


Twin

by Prospect



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Twig - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Biological Warfare, Changing Tenses, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Crown Empire, Crown States of America, Gen, Historical Fantasy, Imperialism, Introspection, Non-Linear Narrative, Revolution, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-05-13 23:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14758049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prospect/pseuds/Prospect
Summary: Once upon the time, the United States of America won his independence from Great Britain.Once upon a time, the Crown Empire reclaimed his colony.Once upon a time, the Crown States of America put pen to paper and began to write.They say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.





	1. All's Fair

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crossover involving the characters of Hetalia in the world of the web serial [Twig](https://twigserial.wordpress.com/). It contains spoilers for the entirety of Twig.
> 
> Twig contains many instances or mentions of war, violence, sickness, body horror, massacres, and various other terrible things I have likely forgotten to mention; while I will not write graphic descriptions of any of these, dark themes are present throughout the setting and will be present here as well. 
> 
> Also, third Twig fanfic ever on this archive, so yay?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"...step after step, rise after fall, his steps trace the plague-ridden skin of his land."_  
>   
>  The Crown States of America reflects on where he is, where he has been, and where he will go.

**1924**  
Crown States of America  
_Spread of the red plague; revolutionary movements_

-x-

The Crown States of America walks through a field of red.

Red vines curling, red leaves unfurling, red flowers blooming, roots sunk into bodies. Plague.

_Ravage._

_Reminiscence._

It will not harm him.

He steps around the corpse of a rabbit, listens for the guns and cannons that fired here only a week ago, still echoing.

It will _harm_ him, but that has little to do with whether he is within the infectious range, and everything to do with how far it spreads, how many of his it kills.

_God…_

But it does not do to dabble in treason. Not when the punishment is…

_God, what has happened to me?_

Not when the punishment is...

_Would it be worth it in the end?_

Equality. Liberty. Justice.

A chance to be...

What a wonderful job he’s done. What a wonderful place he’s at.

It is not one of the days when faces blur in his mind, when the past is ashes and all that’s left is the flame of rebellion, dying low into embers or blazing into an inferno, when old words disappear and all that is left is a blank page and the pen is his hand. It is not one of the days when he _forgets_ , and so, with the weight of his journal in the bag at his side and old deaths ringing in his ears, the past creeps up on him like a fog, like a plague.

It lays a hand on his shoulder and drags him backwards until he gets lost.

He remembers (he does not) a time when he fought through the mud, muskets firing, his flag waving in the air. Again. Again. For liberty and high ideals. He remembers the moment he fell. He remembers the plagues and stitched, toxins and deadland. He remembers waking in chains.

He remembers (he does not) the flag on the wall, the fire in the hearth, the guest in the spare bedroom, the white bear, asking and then pleading and then, deaf ears.

He remembers (he remembers) his city burning, his people uniting, a book on his lap, a field of flowers, candles and _westwards_ and being divided, hands pressed against each other in the dark.

He remembers (he remembers) years of sunshine before Wollstone’s ratios, when he had been younger. When he had been happier. Before it was taken away.

But those are murky memories, now. Muddled and rewritten by purges, by burnings, by erasures and censorship. 

_Would it?_

He remembers a time when the Crown Empire went by a different name. 

_Britain._

_England._

That was a time as different from his present as night is from day. Sometimes it is hard to remember that the nation has remained the same. The Crown stays across the sea, returning only to lay down punishments, to salt the land and leave him to suffer until the flames die. 

Until he bows his head once more. As he did.

As he does.

He views the Crown through a single lens, but his memories of England are fractured, doubled, from a time he was smaller, from a time he was divided. 

He remembers England as a figure crumpled in the mud, the one who fought for him, the one who looked at him and said _family_. He remembers England in toy soldiers and blue daisies. He remembers England carrying him to his new home.

He remembers England taking his hand.

_Let’s go home._

His eyes are stinging. He swallows, tries to swallow back tears. He hasn’t cried in a long while, not over this.

He thought the wound had scarred already under the pressure of years. He thought it was over. He thought he had left it behind. 

But he can’t remember as much as he’d like to, and he can’t forget what he wishes he could.

(Dead rabbits and dead grass and dead, dead daisies.)

England gave him his world, and the Crown Empire twisted it and took it away, and he can’t have it back. It will never be the way it was when he was young.

He breathes. Breathes. Tries to breathe free.

But those are dangerous thoughts.

_What happened?_ but there is no answer he can find, not in himself, not in the journal, not in neighbours or allies or enemies. Ahead of him, all he sees is plague and bodies.

_What have I become?_

He has never been able to let go of it.

He is still trying to find a way through.

There’s an ache in his arm, now, and he thinks he knows what it is, and he knows it it not going to go away, it will get worse before it gets better. But for now he tells himself to keep moving, for as long as he is able, and so step after step, rise after fall, his steps trace the plague-ridden skin of his land.

The nation that was once America, that was once Canada, continues walking, until the fields of red swallow him up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story will be told out of order, alternating history (before Twig storyline, generally 1821-onwards) and present (during Twig storyline, generally 1921-onwards) chapters with no particular pattern. I will label chapters with an event, year, or both to clarify the time period; in addition, history chapters will be in past tense, and present will be in, well, present. While the story uses the Twig setting, it will primarily focus on the Hetalia characters mentioned in the tags and the semi-OC Crown States. No major plot points of Twig will be changed.
> 
> Twig contains an immense amount of worldbuilding and I am not a historian or an in-depth Hetalia fan; I apologize for the errors I will surely make in the course of writing this.
> 
> Since many of the chapters have already been completed, updates may occur in irregular spurts. While I will try to avoid this, some chapters may be inserted _between_ existing ones.
> 
> Title chosen because of similarity to "Twig" + being a four-letter noun in keeping with Wildbow's titling scheme.
> 
> Chapters are named for idioms/proverbs or fragments thereof involving number, quantity, amount, etc. due to the biology-themed phrase/saying titles of Twig.  
> Current chapter: " **All's fair** (in love and war)".


	2. None So Blind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"He'd never really thought he would lose."_  
>     
> Where independence ended, or: that time the world turned downside-up.

**Mid-to-Late 19th Century**  
Western Maine, the United States of America  
_The Second American War of Independence_

-x-

He could not stop hearing it.

The bodies and the blood and ugliness, those America had seen before. He had thought he was strong enough to face them, and he _had_ been, and he was, he knew how to swallow down that horror in the moment and only let it bubble up after the fact, when night had fallen but sleep was far away.

But the screaming.

Gunshots, ringing in his ears, enough that he couldn’t make out the sound of his own bayonet firing among them, though he felt the upward jolt of the recoil.

And still the screaming remained.

Not the intermittent shouts of rage or pain, the scattered cries of those injured or terrified, the background din of war. But the screaming of men taken by the new weapon, by the creatures, by the _parasites_ , men in unremitting and unceasing agony, men collapsed into the torn-up grass and being trampled by their comrades, men suffocating in the noon heat yet still screaming, the sound tearing out of their lungs, shredding their vocal cords, because they could do nothing but, because what they felt was too much to contain. It echoed through the whole wide world but the world did not answer, God did not answer, their fellow soldiers did not answer, their nation could not—

It echoed through the whole world until all that was left was the cacophony ringing all the way through his bones, dragging him down with every step so that he would join them on the ground, hands over his ears, screaming for it all to stop.

 _Keep moving,_ America told it to himself, be deaf and be blind if that is what he needed to be, aim and fire and repeat, keep up with the forward movement of his troops, closing the distance between the American army and the invading force. 

Britain’s force.

Britain. All because of Britain, and at the thought that familiar white-hot rage burned through America. After two wars and peace treaties and trade and all these years and _still_ he found English ships in New York Harbour, it wasn’t enough for Britain that he had Canada and Australia and colonies all around the globe, he _still_ couldn't move one from the fact that America _won_ , America was the one who got out from under his thumb, America challenged him for freedom and succeeded and maybe the world didn't bow to his might after all, huh, maybe he _wasn't_ as all-powerful as he’d like to be.

America _won_ , and he was going to win again, here under the sky bluer and wider than the sea, and his boys who died, men lying on the hills and bluffs, voices destroyed after hours of screaming, paralyzed, collected to be turned into—turned into—

His hands went clammy, and for a moment he remembered them, blank eyes set in still faces, stitches puckering ashen skin in a jigsaw of parts.

On the other side of a shrinking gap.

Finger on the trigger, aim and fire and keep moving, again, again, pushing away the memory, trying to keep his hands steady, trying to claw his way from the shadows into the blinding day.

He’d win, and he’ll make it mean something, mean something more than these screams and gravestones and the bile rising in his throat.

They came into clear view then, over the rise of the hill. The massed forces of the enemy lines.

The corpses walking. Blank eyes. Still faces. Skin like a map of roads in needle and thread.

“Hold the line!” someone called, but it was a small sound amidst the screaming.

 _Beat them back_ , America thought, but he stumbled, then, and belatedly realized that he’d stepped on someone, he’d stepped on one of _his_. His mind caught on that realization and stuck there, replaying it over and over, and he stopped moving, stuck as well.

The thing about people was that they stumbled. They felt and fell and made mistakes. 

The thing about people is that they died, died for good, light snuffed out, eyes blank, no repairs to be made, no limbs to be reattached, no special combination of wires to make them be themselves again, but those stitched—

But those _monsters_ , they never stopped, never stumbled, only walked, endlessly, and reloaded and fired and killed. If they could hear the screaming at all it was nothing to them, it mattered not if the one beside them fell, it mattered not if they cut down someone whose face they once knew. Once fallen they rose again by the next dawn, repaired to kill again. They were tools of war, and tools of war were made for _winning_ , and so they won, and they won, and they never, ever stopped—

It wasn't as if he didn't know arithmetic.

Equality. Liberty. Justice. On the field all those grand ideals faded away until all that was left was rage and fear and the balancing act between them.

As the dead, stitched army advanced, his own men were falling out of alignment, panicking, losing their heads. Some firing aimless and desperate and some crouching on the ground and some fleeing and some simply freezing, eyes fixed across the shrinking hundred yards on their approaching foe. 

People had families waiting for them. People had aspirations they reached for and little things they wished they could see again, people had—

 _So much to lose_.

The thought rang through his mind, louder than church bells, louder than gunshots and cannon fire and screaming. Made him take another step, stumbling again but regaining his balance, aim, fire, sweat beading on his face in the heavy noon heat, moving forward.

Because he knew this land like he knew the back of his hand, knew his own people like he knew himself. Knew every little thing that would be destroyed if he failed here.

Fear. Anger. Hope. In this war, all pointed the same way.

The thing about people is that they _could_ hope. 

They had something they are fighting _for_.

And America’s people, they stood, they came together, rallying in a last and desperate effort, and in the midst of the blood, even with the screaming in his ears and his people in the ground, he held onto that in his mind’s eye. The light on the other side.

The world he was fighting for.

America caught a glimpse of him then, recognized the presence of the other nation. The slight figure, coat like a splatter of blood amidst a sea of it. 

_This isn’t how this ends._

Be deaf and be blind if that was what he needed to be, but _win_.

There was too much to lose.

England was approaching with his army, inexorably, and America standing with his, trying to shut out the voices of the suffering, the faces of the dead, the the arithmetic that became clearer to him with every passing moment, trying to shut out everything but what he might need to do.

Flank collided with flank, maneuver slid against maneuver, jaws closed, spears of people well-aimed sank deep and drew blood while less fortunate formations broke against the skin. The two sides clashed with blades in chests and muskets firing, bodies thrown to the ground, a war, a catastrophe. Orderly lines fell to pieces and disappeared. 

America cut his way through the chaos, knowing who he had to find, remembering parasites and treaties and New York Harbour and letting that rage propel him forward. With every obstacle there was a split second in which he took them in, looked into the eyes and checked the colour of the coat, friend or foe, and took his pick of action. He chose, again and again, pushing past or cutting down, arm or chest or empty air, blood or bone, life or death, right and left and forward and back, whatever he needed to move forward, whatever he had to do—

And the faces blended together, the dead and the living, until he turned and saw nothing but _people_ , his and not, England’s and not, _Canada’s_ and not—

Until he stepped over a body, and there—

His feet were planted solid in the ground, and there stood England, green eyes and red coat and features carved from stone, aiming the point of a bayonet at his throat. 

Just as he remembered.

America’s breath caught. 

It was not the revolution. There were no orderly lines or no man’s land, no rain however near the sea. 

But for a moment it was only the two of them, facing each other, proof of the war in their faces and coats and the trail of bodies behind them.

The blade of England’s weapon flashed through the air between them. America moved to block it with his musket, but rather than sinking into its wood the blade slashed sideways, carving a crimson smile of a gash across the back of his right hand.

His fingers spasmed, a hiss escaping his lips, but he kept his grip on his weapon, backing away, looking up at his foe as he did.

England's eyes were blown wide now, green as some summer field far from here, his hold on his weapon turned unsteady, as if he didn't quite have a grip on himself. 

"Surrender," he said, with bodies still falling on the field.

That set a spark in America's eyes. Blood was pouring down his hand, slippery between skin and smooth wood, but he only tightened his grip, heedless of the stabbing pain that resulted.

"In your dreams," he spat. 

With the pleasantries out of the way, only a single decision remained. A split-second judgment, from the look of a face, the colour of a coat.

His eyes. His coat.

And with the movement of a single finger the screaming _did_ stop.

For a moment, everything did.

-x-

Arithmetic. Strategy. The lay of the land. Maps with cities crossed out. Burn circles and struck matches and fields of ash.

He'd never really thought he would lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: "(There are) **none so blind** (as those who will not see)."
> 
> This was meant to be the battle over the city known in Twig as Tynewear, though I may have over-inflated the battle's significance. “Scarborough Harbor" is mentioned in conjunction with Tynewear, which is also near the ocean; therefore, on the counsel of Google and a comment on the relevant Twig chapter, I have placed the location in Maine. I also made a wild guess at the name of the war; I cannot recall it being named in the text of Twig.
> 
> Time period of war very uncertain; Mauer's "youth" while having a father who fought in it suggests later in the century, mentions of "sins of the past century" suggest sooner. It's definitely after 1821 and probably early-to-mid nineteenth century.  
> Edit: I misread. Mauer was a child when it happened, so that definitely suggests later. Date heading altered for appropriate vagueness.
> 
> Edit 2: Another misreading; parasites came in a later war. It's not a big plot point so at this point, I'm just gonna roll with it.


	3. Penny for Your Thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"He was always a little too good at dreaming."_  
>   
>  After an unsettling day, the Crown States makes an important decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter went through so many dang rewrites. Just gonna post it now, since my efforts seem to be making it _longer_ rather than _better._
> 
> Putting this much Crown States near the beginning of the story makes me nervous, but there'll be a cluster of history chapters with canon versions of Hetalia characters after this.

**Summer 1922**  
Radham, Crown States of America  
_Spate of child abductions ___

-x-

The drizzle peppers his face, dampens his clothes, and he lets it, feeling the water drip across his skin and soak into his jacket, shirt, pants, socks. He thinks that somewhere along the way he lost his distaste for being wet.

It's almost calming. Cleansing. Especially with the summer heat, the haze off the road. In the pitter-patter of droplets on rooftops, in the hushed background _shhh_ of the rain, his mind quiets, memories and worries washing away into white noise. Puddles turn the street into a patchwork of silver mirrors. People rush by, hoods up, faceless yet familiar. His people.

 _Are you okay?_ the Crown States of America wants to ask them as they pass, as they give way or take it, finding their places in this city, cells of a great organism or mice scurrying beneath the eyes of a cat. _Are you fed and warm and safe? Do you have people who love you? What happened? What’s wrong?_

 _Are you happy_ , but sustenance and shelter and health are basic, material things, and happiness is harder.

He would give his people the world, if he could, the sun and moon and stars, anything for them. They are the only thing that matters.

There is only so much he can do.

The Crown States knows that, after all these years. Like he knows that the rain in which he finds that little bit of comfort is no natural occurrence, but an engineered outcome, like a pruned plant, a trained animal.

 _Hush_ , it mutters, but the nation keeps his head up, his ears alert, searching, searching for the signs. The blips in the pattern. The cracks in the veneer.

A movement in the corner of the eye catches his attention, makes him turn his head.

It’s a black Academy carriage, like a streak of tarnish on silver, moving ghost-like through the heat haze and the rain, stitched horses clip-clopping as rain flows off their raincoats. Disappearing towards the outskirts of the city, the shims.

Intuition crooks a finger around his chest and squeezes.

It is only a carriage.

But the Crown States knows this place like he knows the back of his hand. Knows its rhythms and patterns, breaths and heartbeats. Which people smile at each other as they pass and feel a little better for it, which ignore the set norms and are shunned for it. Which buildings have supports of grown, twisted wood and which are older, from the time he has trouble remembering. Knows what brings the Academy’s attention and what doesn't. What the scratched symbols at a child’s eye level on some walls and door frames mean.

Knows when that heart skips a beat. When something is wrong.

The world seems to clarify, everything coming into sharp, painful focus.

He takes a step after the carriage. Then another. Then he _moves,_ like a startled bird, like a carriage, like the breeze, like a nation in his homeland, past the people on the street, past buildings, around waypoints, through rain, and he follows.

-x-

The buildings of Radham become worn-down and ramshackle as the Crown States jogs further from the Academy of the city, into the shims, puddles turning muddy as they splash beneath his feet, bag bouncing at his side, pace driven by urgency.

He slows to a brisk walk, eventually, wiping sweat from his brow, though his eyes are still looking, his ears are still listening. The street blurs without his glasses, but they are near-useless in Radham’s constant rain, and so he makes do with squinting, at the boarded-up windows, at the refuse, at the haggard faces of the people who pass. His people.

Watching them, those questions come to mind again, _safeshelteredfed_ , then the memory of the carriage.

There is only so much he can do.

Looking, he sees no sign of the threat, no trace of anything unusual, and to all appearances there is nothing wrong that has not always been wrong, no danger looming that has not been looming since the Academy sank its roots here, since the war, since—

The Crown States knows this place like the back of his hand. He knows when something is _off,_ and he trusts his intuition, because he _needs_ to. He has needed to for a long time.

There is nothing else to do but keep searching.

The blip in the pattern. The crack in the veneer. The places that shatter. The things that disappear.

And then he sees him.

The child is ten, or perhaps only appearing that small that small due to malnutrition. Clothes ragged and drenched in the rain, enveloped in a too-big raincoat, turning down a narrow, quiet side street, enclosed on both sides by tall apartments of branching wood. Feet splashing through the puddles.

A mouse, under the looming spectre of a cat.

The Crown States takes a step towards him, then another. The child hears his approach and spins around, eyes snapping onto his face, this stranger, alarm already written over his features in wide eyes and lifted eyebrows, in the way he lifts up on the balls of his feet.

Fight, or flight.

“Wait,” calls the Crown States, stopping and reaching out a hand, then, again, more quietly, “please.”

The child takes a step back, then another.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he says, dropping his arm, although words are cheap and the boy must know that. “But you shouldn't go that way. It’s not safe to be out alone right now.”

The boy stops his retreat, for the moment, though his eyes narrow beneath the hood of his raincoat. “Why’s that?”

_It never is._

“There might be a fox on the prowl,” replies the Crown States, and he traces the symbol in the air with his finger, the three triangles the children here scratch into walls to signal danger.

The boy’s eyes follow the shape of the symbol, three triangles for a fox’s head, but he folds his arms. “Why d’you care?”

The Crown States swallows, swallows down the words that well up at the question.

_Because._

_I can’t not._

_Someone should._

_You're one of mine._

_You are the only thing that matters._

He settles for an answer likely to be believed, one not too far from the truth.

“I was like you, once.”

Something about the boy’s demeanour relaxes. He unfolds his arms, nods once. “Well. Thanks for the tip. I need to go down that way though—” he jerks a thumb down the street “—and these streets don’t get much busier than this ‘til five. How long’s it gonna be risky?”

The Crown States frowns at the question. He doesn’t like the look of the street, doesn’t like the boarded-up windows and the way the buildings hide it from view.

“I don’t know,” he says, and his acutely aware of every raindrop on his skin, every passing step, he can’t escape the feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment, the certainty that something is wrong. He bites his lip. “I could walk with you. Only for a few minutes.”

The boy scans his face, considering. “You could be the fox for all I know.”

Something about the comment slides a knife between his ribs and _twists._

 _I’m your nation,_ thinks the Crown States, _I’m your neighbour and your teacher and the passersby on the street, I’m the apartments and the ground beneath your feet, I can’t—_

“Yeah,” he says, so softly as to be nearly inaudible. “I know.”

_But I’m not._

_Please._

The corner of the boy’s mouth twitches.

“You don’t really seem the type. Kind of familiar-looking, actually. And, well.” He shrugs, adjusts his hood. “Safety in numbers.”

He turns and begins to walk again, and the Crown States catches up and falls into step beside him, allowing himself a shaky exhale of relief before he tries to pull his scattered thoughts into order.

 _Pay attention,_ he tells himself.

He sees no sign of trouble, but the puddles flicker with raindrops and their steps are too loud and so he keeps his eyes up, sweeping, over buildings and puddles and branches and lampposts. Searching for the threat.

 _Pay attention,_ but he finds his eyes straying to the boy, and he can’t help but notice the hollow cheeks, the patched clothing, the oversized raincoat, the way he looks around, as if he really is a mouse, sniffing for predators.

 _Are you happy?_ But for too many reasons it is a silly question to ask, and so he doesn’t.

He can’t help but notice, still, how much smaller the boy is, how much taller he is by comparison. And, though they both must still look youthful, how much bigger he must seem.

Blink and he sees it, clearly enough to be blinding: someone, holding out a hand to him, the light too bright in his young eyes.

_Let’s go home._

For a moment he is disjointed, and he misses a step, jarred by the memory, both by the content and by the time it is from, sliding apart at the seams. As if he has two eyes but it the recollection is only visible to one. It is there. It is not. It is his. It is not. He is himself, and he is not, not, the same thing—

_Who?_

Both and none and he shakes his head, tries to focus.

“Who’re you?” the boy asks, breaking the silence, breaking his focus.

The Crown States presses the fingers of one hand against the scar of the back of the other.

Two answers, jumbled in his mind, vying for breath. But he lost them like he lost the border, like he lost himself, for a while. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped being able to answer to them. Somewhere along the way they’d stopped being purely _his_.

He wasn’t young enough for either to have grown archaic. But he couldn’t be two things at once, and he couldn’t be half of something either.

A new name, for a new nation. A book of common names, and the memory of writers like an anchor, as if he could find something to build on that was his own, as if he could hold steady after all.

The sound of it still sits wrong with him at times, but he tells himself, it is better than nothing, he tells himself, at least that means he remembers he was ever different.

“I’m called Thomas.” He tries to smile at the boy, tries to pull himself together and offer something reassuring. “What’s your name?”

The boy’s eyebrows go up.

“It’s the same as yours,” he replies. Then, as he sticks his hands into his pockets, “I know someone else named Thomas too. But he goes by Thom.”

“Is he your age?” asks the Crown States, but then movement on the intersection up ahead catches his attention.

He holds out an arm, barring the boy’s way, and the black carriage glides by, like a ghost in the heat haze off the rain-slick street.

He doesn’t realize he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out.

The boy exhales too, looking from his arm, which he drops, to the spot on the street where the carriage passed.

“He’s a little older,” says the boy. “He tries to look out for some of the younger ones.” A pause, then, “you’re a little like him, y’know. Maybe that’s why you’re all familiar. D’you have any siblings?”

His head aches at the question, a building pressure, and the Crown States presses a hand to his forehead, trying to focus on the pitter-patter of the rain, trying to let it wash away everything wrong in the world. “I used to.”

“Oh.” He hears the boy shifting his weight, then, “What happened?”

There are too many things he could say. There are too little.

_What happened?_

How did he get here?

How did he become this?

He can’t focus properly, he can’t pull together, and the precarious balance inside himself is tipping and tilting, from _Let’s go home,_ from _Who’re you?_

He is never going to see the boy again, and the boy will not remember him. Maybe that is what lets him admit it.

“I don’t know.”

-x-

When he next sees the carriage, on his way out of the shims, it is pulled over on the side of the street, and he stops in his tracks to watch.

The door opens, and a woman emerges, dressed in the grey coat of a specialist. She’s _Eastern_ , across-the-ocean, possibly-from-China-or-Japan Eastern, and the Crown States finds his eyebrows rising at the sight of her face, because the Empire has been at war with those nations for years upon years. The Crown States cannot recall ever knowing either, and their people do not come here.

She’s _his,_ and she’s not, the way nobles are _his_ and not, the way some experiments are _his_ and not.

 _Who are you?_ he thinks, _what were you doing? What have you done? Where are you going now?_

The Crown States is looking, and he sees the carriage, and he sees the woman, and there’s nothing but his intuition to justify his interference and nothing less than the Academy’s fingerprints to prevent him.

He was paying attention, he was watching out. He noticed it, noticed the blip, the oddity. He’s looking, and he _sees_ it, and his fingers tighten on the strap of his bag as his eyes narrow and his heart taps out an uneasy beat, but there is still nothing he can do.

Nothing he can do that won’t—that won’t—

Weapons on the street and superweapons slumbering and the Academy’s ears and eyes and fingers everywhere, over every inch of him.

The Crown States swallows against the way his stomach roils, swallows against the questions he wants to shout.

_There is only so much…_

For a long moment he is frozen, unable to move, neither to leave nor to act. Seconds squeeze and stretch and lose their meaning. Every breath feels like cowardice, but he’s caught there, suspended, between fear, and fear, justification and justification. All he can do is stare at the carriage, as if stunned, and he stares, he watches, as the woman leaves.

And then he looks away, down at the rain-dark sidewalk beneath his puddle-soaked shoes.

The weight of his bag suddenly an anchor. The rain colder than it was a moment before.

He takes a step. Then another.

Nails digging into his palms, he walks, past the carriage, away from the shims, away from the boy he found there, away from the specialist in grey.

A waypoint lies up ahead. On a different day he might stop there, might have to. He might let himself be searched, he might answer the questions of the men who work there. Another mark for the ledger. 

Today he walks past, eyes still fixed on the ground, and he cannot be surprised when no one reaches out to stop him, no one calls for him to halt. With all the words he does not say, all the things he does not do, is not brave enough to, all the excuses and the fear, he makes no sound and leaves no footprints. He is the spectre, he hides, he is invisible and forgotten. He disappears.

Every step feels like a failure. Every step feels like a betrayal. But he walks away, he lets it be, he leaves it alone, the thread of the mystery unpulled, his words unspoken, actions untaken.

_Only so much..._

-x-

His pencil scratches against the paper as he sketches out the face of the boy by yellow lamplight at his desk. He is no artist, and so he erases and revises, going over the lines again and again until they are the closest to memory he can make them. It’s a frustrating task, but on he is used to, one he will regret if he neglects.

On the journal page before, he has already recorded the events of the day.

After the pencil lines of his sketch are true, the Crown States goes over them in ink, biting his tongue, holding his breath, every movement of his hand precise and careful. He captions it, _Mouse in the rain,_ and jots down the notes: that the boy is called Thomas, that he was hungry and had older siblings who handed down their raincoats, that he trusted him after all.

After the caption’s dried he starts on the next sketch. This one is of the woman in the grey coat. He saw her for only a brief time, and he struggles to remember the lines of her face well enough to depict them, struggles not to distort them through recollection. He thinks he fails. The page becomes a blur of graphite, no features to be made out, no person to be found.

The corner of his mouth pulls down. He tries to persevere, but his hand aches from writing, and eventually his pencil stills. Point tapping against the page, his sketches blur as his eyes unfocus, the finished one of the boy, the grey smudge of the woman, until they blend together.

Something about that bothers him. The Crown States blinks and pushes his glasses up his nose, clearing his vision, but they swirl on in his mind, the remembered faces of the child and of the specialist in the grey coat, like ripples in water, like windblown leaves that refuse to settle.

In silence, in the heat haze, forms blurred without his glasses, both may as well have been ghosts.

His thumb finds the side of the journal and he lifts a stack of pages up, lets them fall in a flurry, words and drawings passing in a flipbook of days and months and years. Leaving his pencil as a bookmark, he turns to an entry from the previous summer.

It is of the day Radham’s Reverend Mauer spoke to a crowd, before he went away.

_I just received word that two individuals in the upper west part of Radham were attacked. They were school-age. One of them is gravely injured, to the point that he may be crippled for life._

_The other child is dead,_ the Reverend had said.

(The Crown States can’t see anything wrong that has not always been wrong, since the Academy set it roots here, since the war.)

 _That’s a reason,_ he’d said to someone important, once. _It isn’t going to stop being one._

He looks to the drawings for that day, then. One is of a preteen boy he’d seen in the crowd, with dark hair and green eyes and a face of angles, the one who had said, _We’re not safe at all._ The one he had seen again later, asking, _You never believed in God, did you?_ The one who had smiled like water, like voltaic energy, a lot like a child and a little like a monster.

He doesn’t know why that face struck him so, but he’d noted it down anyways, trusting that he had chosen right, trusting his intuition. He’d needed to, still needs to. There is nothing else to do, nothing else to rely on _but_.

The second drawing is of the Reverend Mauer. Not him as he stood before the crowd, speaking against the Academy, but later, after everything had devolved into chaos. It is of the Reverend pressing a gun to the forehead of a girl whose arms are locked around his waist.

The Crown States imagines, blinks and sees, clearly enough to be blinding, like an explosion in his mind’s eye: the trigger pulled, the gun fired, something sparking. Something kindling.

It puts him off balance, like the ground being pulled out from under him, a sort of breathlessness that inspires recklessness, and the idea comes to him, as it did on that day, hits him over the head and leaves stars dancing before his eyes.

 _Your head is a field of flowers,_ he scolds himself immediately. _It’s too dangerous. It’s a flight of fancy. It’s treading on suicide. It was true the first time you tried it, and nothing has changed._

_You owe too much to rebel._

He presses one hand against against one ear. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to shut out. He doesn’t think it works, it never has, and so he drops his hand.

 _You don’t want to go to war._

The thing is, in this moment, he’s not so sure anymore. With the faces of ghosts swimming before his eyes, the notion doesn’t seem as mad as it did not so long ago, doesn’t feel like a daydream or like launching himself off a cliff. It feels like a hope, like a possibility, like a consequence, like the only option he _can_ that will ever, ever change the reasons why and fix what’s wrong and make it better—

_(We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed.)_

_There’s something,_ he thinks, he feels it, a familiar rush, like sparks catching, like flags waving, like gunshots, like revolution.

Looking into the faces of the smiling boy, the man with the gun, the mouse in the rain, the ghost in grey:

_There is something._

(He was always a little too good at dreaming.)

There is something he could do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Arc 6 of Twig, with callback to Arc 2.
> 
> The amount of facts in this situation that would make it so much worse if they were known is kind of astounding (origin of the grey coats, destination of kidnapped children, identity of kidnappers, etc). Twigverse is a terrible place.
> 
> “We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed” is a line from Mauer.
> 
> The “head is a field of flowers” bit is adapted from one of America’s lines in the scanlated World Stars.
> 
> Chapter title: "(A) **penny for your thoughts**."


	4. Count Your Chickens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"This is where the future lies, can’t you see?”_  
>   
>  In the early 19th century, a single publication forever impressed into the public consciousness the wonderful and terrible power of knowledge.  
>   
> It wasn't Frankenstein.

**1818-18??**  
London, England  
_Creation of the first stitched; rise of the Lord King Adam_

-x-

It seemed the rain never stopped these days, and the skies never cleared, but perhaps that was merely the slump England had fallen into since the year with no summer, since Napoleon fell and the gunfire died, since he’d shaken America’s hand for peace and sent France scurrying in retreat and felt the flush of victory fade as he returned home to reckon with the cost of the war.

It seemed the world was grey, the sidewalks and buildings, the faces, the skies, but perhaps something had been knocked askew in his eyes as he ran them down rows of gravestones and ledgers of numbers.

He smiled little, these days, and laughed less, but that was business as usual. He knew this season would pass, as seasons like it had before. One day he would find that the sniffles and flus that had plagued him in the past years had cleared. One day, he would look up and see the sun shining down.

One day.

For now he kept his umbrella up as he navigated the streets of London, other hand held over the satchel at his side, protecting the documents within from rain and pickpockets.

The bag was light, for something that held so weighty a secret. So important a discovery.

His nerves jangled. He itched to read the papers, to pore over their every word, and yet in the same moment he was uneasy at the prospect.

He wondered: would it be another disappointment? Would it be another false hope in the endless progression of days?

Or could it be the promise of a new dawn?

 _Calm yourself,_ he thought, _you must face this with a rational frame of mind._

He was calm. His hands were still. His posture straight. His face marked only by the slightest frown. The tapping of his heart and the sweat on his palms and the spiral of his thoughts, all invisible.

He was calm, and he was not afraid.

He _was._

A group of children were playing on the street, heedless of the rain. They made a archway of arms and hands. They clapped and laughed and sang.

_Here comes the candle to light you to bed, here comes the chopper to chop off your..._

England’s eyes kept darting back to them as he arrived at his house, as he slipped the key into the lock and turned it and entered. He watched them as he swung the door closed, until it shut them from his view.

He could still hear them singing, even so. Even after they disappeared.

-x-

Night fell without his conscious notice or awareness. Seated at his desk, England rubbed at his eyes. He reached for his cup of tea and, finding it empty, let out an irritated breath.

The papers were sprawled out before him, yellow in the light of the single lamp, shadowed by stacks of books and a globe of the world. He and they existed in a pool of brightness, enveloped by the evening darkness of a silent house.

His head ached with a building pressure. Numbers and figures swam through his mind, ricocheting against his skull, vying for space. Words he did not know and ones he had only learned today. Diagrams of bodies dissected and laid out like pieces of a children’s puzzle. Rates and ratios.

But between the lines and within them, he had found it. All those numbers, all those words and diagrams, every drop of ink. It was the language of a miracle.

His mouth was dry, when he swallowed, and it was becoming more difficult to keep his eyes open. Yet still he scanned those pages. Wollstone’s genius. He was not a scientist enough to check those proofs for fault, those theories for flaws, but they had been checked, they had been tested, and they had been given to him to read rather than being discarded as fiction.

He was not a scientist enough, but still, he knew enough of the concepts involved to recognize the new ground breaking.

It was truly possible, then. To reanimate a man already dead. To drag a part of him back from that last unknown, to make him walk the streets once more.

 _Unnatural,_ thought a part of England, as he sat at that desk, pondering the papers, still but for his breaths. _A perversion of the laws of God and nature. A breach of the sanctity of life and death_.

_Witchcraft._

But then he shook his head, as if he could shake away the Church. He was the last person who ought to be thinking of witchcraft in such a way. And as for beings which seemed mortal human but were not, as for those returned from death, well.

He would have to be a blazing hypocrite to condemn that.

He rested his chin on his hand, examining the papers from a new angle, pondering, then, how this discovery might serve him and his people.

The utility of the reanimated men was apparent. They could serve as tireless workers, performing dangerous occupations and menial labor. They could serve as soldiers, his own people serving even beyond theirs ends, and the bodies of his opponent’s forces turned to his own. Magnifying his power. Increasing his influence.

And Wollstone’s writings evoked potential beyond that.

In the darkness, treading the shore of sleep, it was easier to dream, and so his mind conjured up possibilities and prospects, high hopes and lofty ambitions, imagination so vivid it could almost be flesh already. Of beasts of burden and beasts of war. New sources of sustenance and new forms of agriculture. Medicine, and improvement of the human body beyond medicine. Weaponry, and communication, and art.

His eyes fell upon the globe on his desk.

 _This could be it,_ he thought, reaching out to turn it with a single finger, his heart accelerating. A miracle. A key. For every problem there was a solution and for every ambition there was a path to its achievement and this could be his, this new science, these ratios of life and growth. New ways pioneered, and unknown powers discovered, and the mysteries of creation unfolded. Expanding his capabilities in new directions. Building himself up. Growing stronger, climbing from the rut he’d fallen into. And then...

The prow of a ship, and the wide blue horizon, the sunlight on the waves. Lands untouched by civilization and civilizations of the uncivilized, to be united under his banner, a family to span the world, fingerprints on every continent on the globe. The greatest empire in recorded history.

He could imagine it, unfolding before him.

 _He_ could do that.

 _He_ could become that.

He could…

His breath caught as he paused his rotation of the globe, halfway across the world from where he’d started, with the names of the New World nations spelt out clear.

He could reclaim America.

The thought of his wayward colony sent a jolt through him. He swallowed, and the globe wobbled briefly with the involuntary tremble of his hand.

Blue flowers and storybooks. Cannons firing and words fired in anger. Two nations and Yorktown and the feeling of giving up, the taste of loss.

He was still an empire. He had won his last war. But looking at the map, that globe, all he could see were reminders of his failure. Lands taken by others and lands untaken by him. Lands that broke away, because of him and his weakness, his failure to act decisively, to do what was necessary. The blot of his defeat on history.

His fallibility.

The cracks in the control he’d fought for, over the colonies he now held.

_You used to be so big._

His fingers brushed the map where once there lay the Thirteen Colonies.

He could…

For a moment he saw America’s grin as he shook his hand for a trade deal, ships between their borders laden with goods, and he caught a glimpse of it, the future that could be if he did nothing. But it was a fragile thing before that globe, and a grey one in the lamplight, unprofitable to the part of him that tallied loss and gain, untenable to the part of him that had already dared to look up and hope.

He thought of his people toiling in their factories. The rain, and the gutters it flowed into, and the children who played there. Tired faces. Rows of graves.

The magnitude of the choice he contemplated was great. The _weight_ of all those small, ordinary tragedies was suffocating.

One did not simply _want_ air, or even _yearn_ for it.

Respiration was a necessity for survival.

The pixie alighted on his desk, wings glimmering in the lamplight, and she hissed something urgent in her tongue. Then there were more, a flock of them, on his head and shoulders, on the lamp, hovering in the air alongside the green rabbit that was his companion.

They did not like the numbers. The words. The diagrams. The _means._

“But I need them,” he whispered, because he saw no other way but the one shining before him. Because he had caught a glimpse of the sun, and he could not let it go. “This is where the future lies, can’t you see?”

They were of the old world, and their view of the new one was narrow and fractured, too clear in some areas and obscured in others. It was only their nature to love the world for what it was, and not what it could be.

The world had changed before, and they had come to understand.

They would have to understand, in time.

A calm washed over England then, like fog off the sea, like the tide rolling in, cool and steady and implacable in its movement, focusing his thoughts, smoothing out his frown. It was the calm of one who had decided upon their course.

Blinking exhaustion from his eyes, he gently shooed the fairies off the papers.

“I can see it,” he told them, “quite clearly in fact,” to reassure them of his judgment.

“It will be all right,” he told them, to reassure them of the future.

Then, for respect of their long counsel, “Forgive me.”

It was only a matter of time.

-x-

When the newspaper arrived at his doorstep, seasons later, there were children playing on the street beyond, singing, singing still.

_London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down..._

One look at the headline, and the paper slipped from his numb fingers.

_The King is dead._

Bird-like, time had flown; now it had flown away.

_Long live the King._

He was not afraid.

_London Bridge is falling..._

There was only one direction for him to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because as we all know, the best thing to do after making yourself sick from trying to smash France's teeth in is to hark across the pond and do something that a different you would dub, quote-unquote, "bloody suicidal".  
> Not that it won't work out well enough for him.
> 
> Events mentioned with maximum vagueness so as to avoid errors: Year Without a Summer, Napoleonic Wars, War of 1812, rise of the Lord King (Twig). However, I'm _assuming_ for the purposes of this story that the last occurred prior to the war with America, therefore also early-to-mid 19th century?
> 
> "High hopes and lofty ambitions" and "New ways pioneered, and unknown powers discovered, and the mysteries of creation unfolded" are altered quotes from Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), original text respectively  
> "I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition."  
> and  
> "...more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation."
> 
> Chapter title: "(Don't) **count your chickens** (before they hatch)."


	5. A Bird in the Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Where that will lead us, I suppose we’ll see."_  
>   
>  After a long journey, the winds of change come knocking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not totally satisfied with this chapter, but I have reached the limit of my patience for rewriting and it's mostly stylistic issues anyways. 
> 
> Set prior to None So Blind.

**Mid-to-Late 19th Century**  
Canada West  
_Declaration of war by the Crown Empire_

-x-

Clouded skies and secret knowledge, yet it was snow, not rain, that stung his face as he hurried down the the street. The winter chill bit through his coat; his steps crunched through drifts of white. A snowman waved at him from some resident’s yard, and England was at once charmed and peeved at the suggestion that anyone wearing merely a scarf in this weather could bear so sunny a smile.

In many ways, all was as he remembered, yet he knew if not for the storm he could turn and see the skeletal tree of the growing Academy, if not for the snow there might be dead men cleaning the streets.

In many ways, all was as he remembered, but for the changes of his own making.

The house he sought differed little from any other, sloped roof heavy with snowfall, plume of smoke rising from the chimney. Unlike _certain nations,_ his colony wasn’t the type to have ostentatious tastes; still, he made his presence felt.

From around the dwelling, England heard the muted clucking of chickens. Skirting buried flowerbeds in the yard, he approached the front door, lifted his hand, and knocked.

Promptly enough it swung open, and Canada’s face appeared, eyebrows drawn together in bemusement. “Hello, who’s…” His eyes flew wide. “ _England?_ ”

Canada ushered him inside, and England nodded his thanks as the door was closed and locked behind him, shutting out the winter weather.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” said Canada, as if in apology, flapping his hands helplessly at the snow on England’s shoulders. “I should’ve noticed. You didn’t have to come all the way here, it’s the middle of winter, I could’ve gone to meet you at the docks or—something.”

“Nonsense.” England removed his coat, and Canada reached out to take it and hang it up, frowning at the colour as he did. “A little snow will hardly kill me.”

Though truth be told, the chill lingered still. London’s skies had shed mourning rain like clockwork as autumn ceded to winter; here the skies spat ice and the winds had teeth, always catching him underdressed and by surprise on first arrival.

With all the lands he’d walked since he’d first set sail, and all the skies he’d seen, perhaps changes of climate should’ve ceased to faze him. Yet in some ways it was as if he had only just left, as if he had come directly here, as if _here_ was the only destination that mattered.

He was ready.

He _was._

“Come sit down,” said Canada, casting one last uneasy glance at his coat. “I’ll make some tea.”

Canada led him down a short hallway into the sitting room, where a fire blazed, mercifully, warm light dancing across the walls and the bookshelves flush against them. Cushioned chairs ringed a low table by the fire. In one chair slumbered a white bear cub; on the table lay a book open but facedown, ribbon peeking out from beneath.

“You shouldn’t treat a book that way,” chided England, “you’ll break its spine,” and Canada, flushing, rushed over to mark his place in the volume, close it, and place it cover-up on the table, before departing for the kitchen.

England took a seat, exhaling, trying to shake the cold from his bones. The fire crackled on its hearth as he looked around the room. Canada had done well with the place; the floor was swept, the books tidy on their shelves. Maps and paintings papered the walls; among them hung a single flag, a field of solid red with his own Union Jack tucked into the upper-left corner, cross visible even lacking wind to let it fly.

All as it had been, when he had last visited.

His eyes found the table, and the book that lay there: a yellowed tome of medical ethics, by Thomas Percival. Unease dragged cold fingers down his spine. Somehow the volume seemed out of place, an anomaly, a novelty, too old, too dry, too advanced in writing and mature in topic.

It was not the sort of book he had seen Canada read in the past.

It was the sort of book he imagined he’d have reason to read now.

In many ways, all was as he recalled, but for the changes of his own making.

Canada returned and seated himself across from England, scooping the bear into his lap. The colony too was little changed from his recollections; a touch taller, perhaps, but though mature enough in his behaviour, he still wore the childlike demeanour of one who looked out into the world and believed it would be kind.

“I started the water boiling,” he said. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“My thanks.” It was still cold, after all, though England began to suspect that the weather wasn’t fully to blame; perhaps it was more the fault of this land’s strangeness, or God forbid, his nerves.

“It’s no problem.” Canada gave him a little smile. It melted away as he said, “I know it’s been a while, but I don’t think I ever said it to you in person—I’m sorry about Wollstone.”

Some part of England ached at that. It was the oddest thing, because he hadn’t mourned the scientist, had hardly thought of him at all, because Wollstone had died not long before the former King, the rise of the new eclipsing his demise. Years and seas had passed without the sentiment of sorrow. Yet sitting all those years and seas away, with another nation to confirm the loss, England remembered the rain that never stopped falling, miracles by lamplight, all that Wollstone had accomplished, and all that he might’ve gone on to.

“Great minds come and go.” He blinked and looked away from Canada, towards the flickering fireplace. “And the world turns on.” Crossing one leg over the other, he carefully folded his hands on his knee. “It’s hardly the first time someone illustrious has perished. Wollstone left his mark, at least, which is more than most men can say.”

Quickly, he added, “And it has been a while,” because it _had,_ and otherwise Canada might assume that—

Otherwise Canada might assume.

“I know,” said the colony.

The fire crackled.

A long silence, then a breath.

“I don’t know,” Canada murmured. “I’ve been thinking about Wollstone a lot lately. How they died. It must be the most terrible thing, to be killed by something you brought to life. Sometimes I think about how if they hadn’t found the ratios, they might still be alive, and I wonder if they regretted it, in the end. If they had time to at all.” An embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not a good topic to dwell on.”

“He changed the world in his life,” England said. “And people die as easily in obscurity as they do in fame. It would be a foolish thing to regret.” Canada’s words sat uneasily with him, nonetheless, and there was little more worth saying on the grim subject; turning back to face the colony, he changed it. “I suppose you must be wondering why I’m here.”

“I thought maybe it was something to do with the Academies,” Canada admitted. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you, but I know you’ve been busy, and you usually write ahead before you visit. And there’s been all this new construction…” He hesitated, peering at England’s face, and the words tumbled out of him in a single breath, a waterfall, an avalanche. “Is it because of what I wrote to you about last fall?”

England gave him an odd look. “And what was it you wrote to me last fall?”

He regretted his words immediately; Canada flushed, almost seeming to fold in on himself, and stammered, “N-nothing. Nevermind.” He tried to smile, though it wobbled around the edges, and England was left with the nagging feeling that he had wronged or hurt or disappointed the colony, though he could not for the life of him remember _how._

“Is construction progressing well?” he asked, in an attempt to move past the moment of awkwardness.

Canada nodded rapidly. “It’s—with the wood that grows by itself—it’s very fast. Everything is moving very fast.”

“Good news, then.”

“I know,” nodded Canada, but his arms were wrapped tight around his bear, and he sounded less as if he was relating a positive development and more as if he was acknowledging a terminal disease.

“Is something the matter?”

Canada’s eyes flickered to the book on the table and rested there for a long moment. “It’s—it’s silly. I had a nightmare, that’s all. I shouldn’t be so worried about it.” He shook his head. “I really am growing up rather slowly, aren’t I?”

“You shouldn’t put so much stock in Australia’s teasing,” England told him. “There’s nothing wrong with your current pace.”

“It’s silly,” Canada repeated. “I know the Academies are important.” He took a deep breath, loosening his grip on his bear, then looked back up at England. “Are they the reason you’re here, then? Or…” He bit his lip. “I’ve heard rumours…”

“The Academies are _related,_ ” confirmed England, “but not the direct cause. What have you heard?”

Canada shifted in his seat. He looked about, as if for eavesdroppers, then leaned forward.

“That you’re going to war,” he said.

England let the words roll over him, an ocean wave, leaving monsters beached upon the shore.

He said nothing.

He hardly dared breathe.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Canada continued. “That the King is—different—and he wants more territory.” His fingers tapped a nervous pattern on his knee; his eyes were fixed on England’s face. “Is it true, then? Will there be a war?”

... _graced by the presence of the rightful Lord King Adam, Emperor of the one hundred nations, bearer of the Crown, sword, and scales…_

His monarchs were symbols, his monarchs were eras, they were the shifting of the tides. He had hated them and loved them; he could never afford indifference to them.

“The King is a first, I believe.” England laced his fingers together. “Of his name, and of his kind. Where that will lead us, I suppose we’ll see. In the short term, however, you’re correct.”

It was harder to speak the words than he’d anticipated. He knew their sounds, knew their meanings, but placed together they made a _push_ down a path with no end in sight, a shrouded and perilous unknown. There were cracks hidden between the clean precision of ink and runes, ratios and knives. It wasn’t so terribly hard to lose oneself. To lose it all.

He did not _want_ this war.

(He did _not_.)

He did not want this war, did not want its cost or the harm it would inflict, but in the affairs of nations, rarely was it a matter of wanting. It was a matter of interests, and futures, and what he could live with, and what he could not.

He knew who he was. He knew _what_ he was.

He knew what he needed to become.

“Today I declare war on the United States of America,” he said, as if it was nothing, as if he was commenting on the weather.

It was everything, it was the mountain looming before him, it stole the air from his lungs and took the words from his mouth.

It felt like taking the first step off the edge of a cliff and swaying there, between safe ground and the fall, a breathless, imperfect equilibrium.

Canada blinked. “Sorry, pardon?”

“Today I declare war on the United States of America,” England repeated. The words came easier the second time, and he added, “You might be among the first to hear.”

Canada’s hand went to his mouth. “Again? _Why?_ ”

“You said it yourself.” England found himself unable to meet Canada’s eyes. “It is a matter of conquest. Of gain—or regain, I suppose. You can expect to expand your lands in the near future.”

Canada said nothing, only stared at him, wide-eyed and wordless, as if the ground had been pulled out from beneath him, as if he had woken from a dream, and all which had been familiar was now monstrous and strange. England waited for him to speak, to ask further questions, but nothing came but silence.

“Are you upset?” he asked, and immediately chided himself for doing so, because the colony quite obviously _was._

Canada jolted, blinking, and pushed his glasses up his nose. All of a sudden he seemed _present_ once more, though England hadn’t noticed him to be _absent_ before. He opened his mouth to speak, appeared to think better of it, then forged ahead regardless.

“He’s my _brother_ ,” he said, as if that one word was all that was necessary, was all that mattered. “And I’m his too. And you’re my…”

He trailed off, seemingly unable to find the word, and the silence was punctuated by a staccato rapping, knuckles on wood, the sound of someone knocking on the front door. England felt the faintest thread of _something,_ like a presence, like déjà vu—

He raised his eyebrows at Canada. “Expecting a guest?”

“No. I can’t think of who it could be.” The colony’s brows were drawn together once more. “The neighbours are nice, but I’m not _that_ close to them, really, no one comes to visit except you and France and—”

Colour drained from his face, exsanguination, writing in reverse, like ink bleeding from a letter.

“Canada?”

“I’ll get the door,” he said, leaping from his seat, depositing his bear in his place, and then he was racing from the room, footsteps pattering down the hall, and he was gone.

-x-

The handle was freezing cold beneath his fingers, and for a moment he gripped it, white-knuckled, clinging, an anchor line, a balancing act.

Dread chilled his skin like frost on leaves and his heart tapped out a frantic beat and he breathed, breathed, tried to breathe, but couldn’t find the air.

_Today I declare war on—_

The front door swung open easily when Canada pulled, oiled hinges, quiet as a sweet dream. A flurry of snowflakes flew at his face. One landed on the lens of his glasses, and he fumbled to brush it away, only succeeding in smearing his vision.

He recognized his visitor, anyways.

He couldn’t _not._

Outside, bundled in winter clothes, stood the United States of America, arm upraised to knock again, pink-cheeked and bespectacled and oh-so-familiar, like an echo, like a deadline, like the first cold breeze of a storm.

Canada saw the Academies rising in his mind’s eye and realized their purpose; he glimpsed the colour of England’s coat out the corner of his eye and prayed America would not notice.

He knew the shape of this refrain, this melody, this history, tug-of-war, the warring brothers, ships across the pond, a pattern he had never been able (never dared) to break.

The cold hit him a moment after the recognition, and he gasped, stood aside, frantically waved America into the warmth of the house.

The southern nation let out a breath as he stepped over the threshold. He brushed the snow from his shoulders, stomped it off his boots, squinted through his fogging glasses. Canada saw the world consumed by winter white outside, felt the breeze on his face and the iron door handle freezing against his skin, and he thought of the fire at his hearth, the kettle in his kitchen.

But America was far too close, beneath the same roof as England, match and wick with oil soaked into the floorboards, only a hall and a brother and turn between them.

Canada shut the door behind America, then slipped around him and stepped into his path, barring his advance down the hall.

They faced each other. America had loosened his scarf, exposing his face. He had the same blue eyes as always, the same unruly tuft in his golden hair, the same bearing, the same brilliant smile. Canada searched his face for similarities and wondered how anyone ever mistook them for each other.

They stood nearly the same height. _Nearly,_ thought Canada, and then, _when did that happen?_

He took breath for a greeting, but a question tumbled out instead, words stretched taut, the string of an instrument strained to snapping.

“What are you doing here?”

His voice didn’t sound like his own.

America grinned and spread his hands, eyes bright behind his clearing glasses. “Aw, can’t I visit my brother?”

It was such an _America_ thing to say that it almost hurt to hear, that nothing had bearing on the worthiness of a trip but the purpose and the destination, not geography, not climate, not time, not politics. Canada first felt the familiarity like a steadying hand on his shoulder, like an anchor line, like stepping back an hour, a day, a decade, a century—

“You can’t just arrive at people’s houses like that,” he protested, voice falling into a familiar cadence, and then he felt it like an ache, because he knew it wasn’t true.

The familiarity was a thing of peacetime, and they were no longer at peace.

America only smiled his bulletproof smile, not knowing. In that moment Canada saw with terrible clarity the divide between them, the gulf of an hour’s worth of time and knowledge. It was a familiar scene, America at his door demanding entry, but Canada thought not of surprise visits but of a home invasion, a cry for aid, of matches and bugle calls, red and reddened coats. Of _silence,_ thick as snow, tense as a predator curled to strike.

The wish crystallized clear, like glass, like a bell:

_He badly did not want to go to war._

It sang through his bones and he recognized it by feel, the tug-tug-tug of discontent, and then he was afraid, because it was only his _wants_ that had changed, not the wisdom of having them.

“What,” said America, “are you gonna kick me out?”

His tone was light, joking, but the words formed like ice on Canada’s tongue, and for a bare moment he could taste it, the simplicity of the solution. _Yes, you have to leave. This isn’t a good time. This is a really, really bad time, and you can’t be here right now, and I’m sorry._

Ice to water, swallowed back down, cold enough to make him shiver. The shape of it was all wrong, ugly, cruel, another confrontation, a betrayal. An _impossibility_.

It was such a small problem, keeping England and America from each other’s throats, but it was at once a problem big enough to swamp him in impossibilities, send his thoughts chasing their tails, make it _impossible_ for him to breathe easy.

He didn’t have much time.

Canada reached out and seized America’s elbow and blurted, “Promise me you won’t get into a fight.”

America gave him an odd look. “Who am I going to get into a fight with, your chickens?”

Canada felt his grip tightening and, though he could hardly _hurt_ the other nation, tried to relax.

“America,” he said, “this is really important. You have to promise me you won’t—you won’t go out of your way to start a fight, here and now. Promise me you won’t do anything.”

“You don’t dictate my foreign policy, bro.” America peered at his features. “Hey, are you alright? You look really pale. Paler than usual, I mean. Is the old man being a jerk again and saying we can’t hang out? ‘Cause if so, I’ll—”

“ _Alfred_.” The name rang odd to his ears, despite the ease with which it came to mind. _America’s,_ but it wasn’t _America_ , not really, only the part of him Canada thought might _listen_. “I have a guest over, just promise me you’ll try to be civil with them, _please._ ”

He paused, and then, with shaky challenge, added, “Unless, unless you think it’ll be too difficult for you—”

America held up his hands, tugging his arm from Canada’s grip in the process. “Okay, okay! I promise. Honestly, it’s like you don’t trust me or something.” He paused; Canada bit his tongue. “So, who’s around? Is it France?”

_I wish—_

Canada let out his breath. He shook his head.

“Eng—Britain?” America looked at him with sudden searching inquisition and he was pinned in place, like needles, like the beam of a magnifying glass, butterfly to corkboard. “You know we’ve settled our differences, right? I don’t get why you’d be so panicked about me getting in a fight with one of those Europeans…”

Canada couldn’t help the brief flicker of his eyes to the coat rack, and America followed his glance, tilting his head as he noticed what hung there, smile faltering at the incongruity.

“Wait, that looks like…”

It looked like something out of place, like a sore thumb, an anomaly, something that didn’t _fit,_ something that fit too well. It looked like war, past and present and future, like the spectre of blood on the dawning horizon. It looked like a weight he could imagine around his shoulders, a set of duties to bind him to his course, his little choices slipping away, one by one, like stars in the morning sky, until none were left—

“That would be mine.”

Canada knew the moment he heard that it wasn’t _his_ voice _,_ not America’s, not the way either of them used it, the accent and pitch and tone all wrong. His heart sank to his shoes.

There were only so many people it could _be._

He turned.

England had his arms crossed over his chest, like swords to bar a path. He held himself ramrod straight, chin lifted, almost rooted, almost brittle, his feet planted just outside the sitting room. Faint firelight half-lit his right; a long shadow climbed the wall to his left. Caught in the wavering in-between, he looked more the _nation_ than the person, at once too near and impossibly remote.

“You were correct,” he said, words filed with impeccable disdain. “It is, as you so succinctly put, ‘the old man.”

Canada spun back around to see America pave over his surprise with a smile, the _substance_ of it altered for the paving, steel in the place of gold, brightness more like armour than the sun. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and aimed that smile over Canada’s shoulder.

“Crown Kingdom,” he said, tone light, casual, and the words went over too, like light through glass, like words past air. “Social call?”

Canada half-turned to catch England’s expression, saw him drawn too clearly through the clean right lens of his glasses, America’s face obscured by a smudge in his peripheral vision. _Nearly,_ he had thought, _nearly the same height,_ but they might as well have been giants, might as well have been on higher ground, enough distance to afford forgetfulness, afford indifference. Annoyance flickered and died in his throat, leaving only a small lump, a bitter residue, dread like frost on leaves. He took a step to the side, then another, until his back knocked against the wall, looked from nation to nation and saw only air between them, nothing at all to bar the smiles and words and glares, to stop them from picking each other to pieces, as if there had been nothing—

Canada looked from nation to nation, the set of the empire’s jaw, the squaring of America’s shoulders, air between them taut with tension, and he grasped for the words to set it right, to soothe that acrimony, smooth away that tension, delay that revelation.

It felt like reaching for the moon, like reaching through mud, like floundering beneath the weight of words already said and wars already waged. He could feel his hands pressed flat against the wall; he remembered past squabbles, familiar tableaus, America and England, England and France. His words stuck in his throat. He didn’t have might, or experience, or independence, no reasons for anyone to _listen_ to him, only the patience to work towards them, and he was still waiting.

There was only so much he could _do._

“There’s a kettle already on for tea,” he said, “but I could make some coffee too,” and surprised himself with the steadiness of his voice.

Neither replied, nor glanced his way. England’s expression was the tide coming in, was the sea freezing over, tiredness and irritation smoothing out into nothing at all.

“I have a message for you,” said the empire, voice stripped of inflection. He withdrew a small scroll of parchment from his pocket and tossed it to America, who caught it, one-handed, before holding it out at arm’s length for inspection, as if it might be poisonous.

Canada’s hand twitched upward, then fell just as quickly. America glanced from the scroll to him to England, smile flickering, sensing that some was amiss without knowing _what._

Still not knowing.

“Don’t read it here, America.” Canada’s words fell like ash, like snow. “It isn’t good news, and this isn’t a good time or place. You should—you should go home. They’ll need you, soon.

America either ignored or failed to hear him. He broke the seal of the scroll and unrolled it, fumbling to hold it open. His eyes travelled over the words within.

Canada screwed his own eyes shut, then reopened them.

The paper crumpled as America’s grip tightened. He lifted his head to glare at England, eyes blazing, colour rising on his cheeks. “What is this?”

“War,” replied the empire, stiffly. “Is it not obvious?”

“What is it this time?” demanded America. “What are you trying to take from me?”

“It’s not _taking,_ ” said England, “to reclaim lost property.”

His voice still had that emotionless quality, and Canada thought, _you don’t mean that,_ but it didn’t _matter_ what he meant; the words were said, the knife twisted between ribs, and wounds didn’t bleed any less for the intent behind the stab.

America stepped forward, hands fisted, message crumpled in one, and Canada did too, because in that moment he saw the blow like a telegraphed thing, like prophecy, like consequence, the wind-up, the explosion of motion, knuckles on skin, the impact, aftershock, shockwave.

 _Wait,_ he said, or maybe it was _stop,_ or _listen,_ or no words at all.

That was where it ended. That was where it began.

The blow never came. America’s shoulders, tensed in anger, relaxed. The thin line of his mouth smoothed out, until he wore a broad, easy smile, although his eyes remained hard and bright and dangerous. He released the paper he clutched, letting it fall to the floor, and kicked it in England’s direction.

When he laughed it was sharp-edged, like punctuation, like an explosion in miniature. “Ha! Guess I should’ve known, huh? Your Academies and your little secrets and your monster of a king. Here I was thinking you were over this, that you were someone I could actually _work_ with, but you’re just the same. Nothing’s ever gonna be enough for you. You just keep _taking_ , and taking, and taking.” He shook his head. “Well, you’re not taking anything of mine. I’m not going to let you.”

England’s face had gone bloodless, and America pointed a finger at him, like accusation, like weaponpoint. “I’m never, ever going to be yours again. You want to bleed your people into the mud for it? _My_ people will fight to defend what’s ours. You want everything to be like the way it was? Well, hate to break it to you, _old man_ , but the world’s moved on. I won a war to become independent. If I have to beat you again to make you acknowledge that, then I will.”

He let his hand fall, breathing hard, then turned to Canada and held it out loosely, open-palmed, like a handshake, like an offering. “Are you still with him, this time?”

Canada stepped away from the wall. He turned to face America, again, the two of them, imperfect mirrors. His brother was flesh and blood, was a ghost, clear through one eye and smudged through the other. Canada looked to his feet, the way he shifted his weight; at his hand, suspended in midair; at the way his throat moved as he swallowed. In that moment he saw the America of the present day, and the America of the Revolution, and every America that had ever asked him, _Are you going to be independent? Are you still on his side? Don’t you want to stand with me?”_

He felt it again, stronger, that _tug-tug-tug_ of discontent, like raised voices, telling him that something was wrong, like hands pulling at him, as if all he had to do was step forward, reach out—

Fear, a colder thing, rooting him in place, snowperson, skeletal tree. He felt England’s eyes burning into the back of his head, felt the seams all over his skin, a stitched-up creature with parts that didn’t match up, borders between West and East, island and island, barriers of language and culture and history. Sentiments stirred beneath that patchwork skin, testing the strength of the common ground holding it together, as if he was a thing of magnets and voltaic energy, as if all he had to do was _move_ the wrong way and he would come flying into pieces.

He thought of how America had cracked right down the middle and how his people had bled to put him back together, how strong those welds had looked fresh-forged, how terribly they’d broken. He thought of America’s long, long shadow, dark enough to disappear in; he saw the cast of England’s face after Yorktown. He remembered letters in fall, flags on the wall, the bright spark of hope, the slow press of time.

_I can do it, maybe..._

_Is your head a field of flowers?_

_Freedom_ was a word that tasted like blood, however long and hard he’d tried to keep the two separate. He couldn’t see the future America promised. It might as well have been sailing through a storm unanchored, stepping off the trail he’d marked for himself through dark woods without a lantern to light his way.

He knew _what_ he was. He knew what he wasn’t.

He had patience, still, for a while longer, and there was so little else he could afford to lose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s never as simple as you make it sound.”

_And we’re not as alike as you’d like us to be._

He was still facing America, and in turning to do so the shape of the confrontation had changed. It had ceased to be America against England, with Canada caught in the middle; now America faced down two nations in a land that was not his own.

Canada thought America might be angry, then, and he _was,_ but it was a brief thing, a flash in the pan, quickly burning out. He dropped his hand, and looked between Canada and England, and said, with a nod, “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

In that moment America _slipped,_ in a thousand minute ways, shoulders slumping, face creasing, eyes shifting downward, like disarray after a sudden breeze through an opened window, and Canada saw, through that window, as he should’ve seen all along, that without his without his shiny cheer and shrugged-on confidence and righteous anger, all America looked was tired.

He wore it badly, because he wore it so rarely, because it didn’t _fit,_ it wasn’t supposed to be, and that scared Canada more than anything.

“It’s not that I don’t care about you,” he blurted, because it was abruptly important that America _know._

America laughed, again, but this time it was a friendlier sort of laugh, one than held humour rather than derision. Turning away from England, he walked up to his brother and punched him once, lightly, in the shoulder. “‘Course not.”

“Hey!”

America looked him in the eye. “Look, I dunno why you stick with him, but I believe in you, bro. Don’t let that jerk boss you around. Stand up for yourself. You can do whatever you want.”

Canada shook his head, wordless, but felt himself smile.

America scoffed. “Pfft. You just gotta have faith in yourself. Look, heck with experience or whatever, get autonomy and figure out the other stuff as you go. Hey, it worked for me, right?”

_And look how well that turned out—_

All Canada could do was smile.

America made a rude gesture in England’s direction, then turned for the exit, rewrapping his scarf in sharp, jerky motions on his way out.

The door swung open when he pulled, easily, silently, like oiled hinges, like alienation. America paused on the threshold for a long moment, silhouetted in snow, between warmth and cold, family and the way home, an imperfect equilibrium.

He looked back. The gleam of his glasses hid his eyes. “Bye, Canada.”

“Stay safe, America,” replied Canada, softly enough that he wondered if his brother heard, but before he could repeat it, the door slammed behind America, and he was gone.

His smile slipped away in the silence after. He slumped against the wall, letting his breath out in a little _huff_.

He couldn’t put a finger to what he _felt._ His thoughts were noise, formless, disarray. He was brimful and overflowing with vying emotions, exasperation, worry, desperation, hurt, shock, too many for him to name, impulses pulling him in impossible directions.

Not _sadness,_ particularly, but his eyes stung, and he blinked hard, once, twice, trying to clear the feeling before it turned into tears.

“I _hate_ family fighting,” he said.

A sharp whistle issued from the direction of the kitchen. The kettle had come to boil.

-x-

He hurried past houses and streets, bundled tight in his coat, squinting through the snow, catching glimpses of rooftops, trees, a bright flash of fabric, a waving hand. His feet sank deep into the drifts uncleared by carriages or pedestrians, a trail of footprints stretching out behind him. He couldn’t find the footprints he’d left on his journey in the opposite direction.

Somehow it felt colder leaving than it had arriving.

The snow stung where it landed on the bare skin of his face, in the narrow gap between hood and scarf. Vividly America saw the smudge on the lens of Canada’s glasses, the look in his eyes as he peered past it, not quite focused.

His own glasses were freezing against his skin, heavy as armour, cold as hindsight. The voices of his people chorused in his ears, north, south, east, west, harmonious and discordant by turn. Something in his bones still knew the feel of war footing, the shift in balance, all the workings of his economy and the lives of every person aligned towards a singular goal.

He remembered it so clearly it hurt, and he wondered for a moment how the older nations could bear it, time and time again, century after century, death after loss after tear, without falling apart—

One hand clenched into a fist.

_The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants._

Anger was a _push_ inside him, the blaze of a furnace, the spark of a musket, propelling him forward, past his knowledge of the cost.

 _Stay safe,_ said Canada in his mind, but _Canada_ wasn’t independent. Canada didn’t have to fight his own battles, defend his own borders. It was easy for _him_ to call for peace. Canada grew a garden and made tea and balked at the sight of blood, as if he’d never killed, as if he’d never warred when it suited him—

 _Promise me,_ said Canada, fingers at his elbow, smiling as he shook his head, the worry in his eyes behind smudged glasses, near and at once very far.

And he remembered a time when he had gone to Canada’s house and Canada had shown him the chickens in the yard, how he’d chased an orange hen in circles and scooped it into his arms and clucked until its struggles calmed, and then passed it to America, as easily as he might’ve passed the butter, easy as smiling. America remembered a moment of singular focus, in which there had been no wars past or future, no currents of trade to navigate, no vitriol of politics, only him and the living, breathing creature in the circle of his arms, and then he had let it go.

(He’d had a pet once. _Had._ At least _once._ He was sure of it.)

The memory stuck in his mind and looped back on itself, feathers on the ground, high summer sun, again, again, and he couldn’t put a finger to _why_ , except perhaps that for a moment he’d caught a glimpse into Canada’s life, and it hadn’t been _bad,_ precisely, but it hadn’t been _his,_ he didn’t want it to be _his._

He’d chosen between peace and liberty before, and he chose liberty. Every time, he chose liberty.

North. East. South. West. A nation and a chorus. He was the _United States_ of America, all the pieces of him moving in unison, and beneath his anger lay hope, lay a bone-deep faith in his people, the certainty that they would see him through to the end, that this too would pass. That they could bear it between them, whatever the price to make it there.

Whatever it took, from them, from him.

He would win.

(He _would._ )

The snow was a blanket smothering sound, was fog obscuring vision. America saw no others as he pressed forward, and he entertained the fanciful thought that perhaps there was no one else. Perhaps there was only a traveller from across the border, returning home after a visit to his brother.

He listened for carols, because it was the season, but heard only silence, and so, glasses heavy on his face, stumbling on unseen obstacles, he began to hum his own.

_Still through the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled,_

_And still their heavenly music floats_

_O'er all the weary world…_

The snow covered up his footprints behind him, and he went home, where they would need him soon.

-x-

Memories. Doubts. History. Misgivings. All the things he’d chosen to ignore, everything he’d pushed beneath the surface to drown, and now they were rising back up, catching him in their jaws, like monsters he couldn’t quite slay. Like he was a ship charting off-course, drifting, struggling not to capsize. England mouthed the words he’d spoken under his breath, _message, war, property,_ and couldn’t quite recall why or how he’d decided to voice them, or if it had been wisely done.

He took another sip of his still-steaming tea, and the scalding heat helped ground him, helped remind him who and where and what he was.

All that mattered was that he had spoken the words. Diplomacy had little meaning but as an avenue to demand surrender. Consequences were only inevitable.

America’s words rattled around his head like bullets, but away from the nation they seemed less like promises and more like bluster, to be swept away with time and overbearing force.

It was done. It was enough.

It would have to be enough.

Across the table Canada too brooded in silence, fingers wrapped around his teacup, as if his hands were cold. There was a sombre cast to his face, and England couldn’t help but compare him to the child with the too-big jacket in 1813, crying over burnt fingers from York, and the one who’d handed England the matchbox after, eyes bright, believing always that the tide was still in their favour.

It was something he’d always had difficulty recognizing, the growth of colonies.

Canada caught him looking and smiled, a reassuring thing, an expression that said _everything is and will be okay._ In that moment he looked every bit still the child, still capable of being enamoured by glory and righteousness and patriotic spirit, still optimistic, all the things that led him to war and which war had not taken away.

Had England not seen his face a moment earlier, he would not have assumed the smile to be anything but natural.

It bothered him that Canada could fool him with such ease, and he wondered how often he’d done it, which smiles had been genuine and which had been masks pulled on to appease an empire.

“I apologize for putting you in a difficult position,” England said.

 _Thank you,_ he thought, but the words stuck in his throat. An insistent part of him told him that they weren’t _owed,_ not _really_.

Not to a colony.

“It’s all right,” said Canada. He took a careful sip of tea. “Siblings fight all the time, don’t they?”

His voice lilted over the _don’t they,_ as if uncertain.

“Mine certainly do,” muttered England. “Though I can hardly recommend them as an example of good behaviour.”

Canada smiled again, but said nothing, only looked down into his tea as if attempting to divine the future in the leaves.

“If you’d prefer not to fight your brother...” began England, with some guilt.

Canada’s eyes went to the flag on the wall, Red Ensign in bloody glory, and for in the space of a blink his smile slipped. In that moment England had a glimmer of understanding that masks weren’t such easy things to wear, that it wasn’t as simple as picking a face and putting on, that they stuck, or fell, or chafed, or for, Canada, cracked along their fault lines into shards.

“Everything I have is yours,” the colony said. “I owe you too much to say.”

It sounded less like a reassurance and more like a rebuttal, a correction, or, in the strained tone of Canada’s voice, a worry.

Then he looked away from the flag, and met England’s eyes, and smiled a third time.

“It’s all right,” he repeated. “I wish you wouldn’t go to war. I don’t… I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. But I’ll support you, if there’s… if you’re really sure that this is what you have to do. I’ll still be here.”

This time England did manage to say “Thank you”, although the words came out softer than he would’ve liked, and he wondered at how young Canada still was, that he did not know: one could become accustomed to anything. To deaths, to war, to enmities, to dead walking the streets; all it took was time. Generations adapted.

Canada nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching, but said nothing in reply. England was paying close enough attention then to notice his eyes unfocusing, a frown forming as some thought captured his awareness. He was paying close enough attention to notice when Canada ceased to be wholly _there._

The colony muttered something under his breath, a fluid thing that sounded like French, and he pressed one hand to one ear, as if checking his hearing, as if shutting out a sound.

Questions hovered on the tip of England’s tongue. He could demand an honest answer, could push and prod until he found the truth, some piece of insight he could not glean from observation, some understanding he could use to bring everything back into accord. Perhaps that was the right thing to do. The responsible thing to do.

But Canada had given him his loyalty, and he could ask for nothing more.

England sipped his tea. The fire crackled. He thought of America’s laugh, sharp with contempt and derision. He thought of the slam of the door. He thought of his stitched in rank and file, the colour of blood on black fabric. He thought of grey skies and salt breeze, deep ocean and cliff ledges, and across from him Canada thought his own thoughts, whatever they might have been.

They lost themselves to the things in their heads, until the tea grew cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the rough patches/style issues. Like I said, I'm not super happy with this chapter's flow and how it turned out in general, but I sort of started stagnating and I think it's better I just move on to the next chapter. 
> 
> It turns out I got the time period for the war drastically wrong, since Mauer, mentioned to look young in the early 1920s, was a child when it occurred. I also have no idea what the knock-on effects of Wollstone's ratios did to world history, but it was probably significant beyond my ability to model. For thematic reasons I have decided that in this story a) the Civil War happens anyways and b) the Crown Empire's invasion comes after it, but this probably isn't the most realistic. For more evidence-based reasons, I'm also deciding that Canadian Confederation did not occur in any recognizable form, due to Britain deciding to keep and increase its colonies rather than gradually granting autonomy.
> 
> "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" is from Thomas Jefferson. Oddly appropriate in a world with literal flesh trees.
> 
> Carol quoted: "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear", written by an American after the Mexican-American War.
> 
> Chapter title: " **A bird in the hand** (is worth two in the bush)."


	6. Letters I: Two in the Bush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"It was a story, but it ended, it always ended in the same place."_  
>   
>  The Second American War of Independence, in letters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timeskip semi-epistolary chapter—it's a format that'll repeat a few more times in this work. Fair warning for a rather monstrous wordcount.  
> I know very little about 19th century warfare and it is scarcely described in Twig. Forgive me.  
> Lead-up to "None So Blind".

**Mid-to-Late 19th Century**  
North America, numerous locations  
_The Second War of American Independence_

-x-

A man woke from a dream.

Like a drowner struggling for the surface, he gasped into awareness, sucking down lungfuls of air. His heart pounded in his ears. In the shapes of the shadows and the corners of the room he saw grasping hands, grinning mouths, heard laughter high and cold, a roomful of enemies.

The man fumbled for the curtains of the nearest window, pulled them aside.

Saw the moon floating high and sickle in an inkwell sky.

It was just past midnight.

Gradually, his breathing calmed. His heartbeat settled.

He looked around the room, searching the shadows and corners for demons and monsters.

Saw only shadows. Only corners.

He was alone.

The man drew the curtain back over the window, shutting out the light, then lay his head back down on his pillow, rolled over in his bed, and returned to uneasy sleep.

-x-

_France,_  
_I trust that by the time this letter reaches your doorstep, the news already will have. I trust also that the boy will have made overtures and requested your aid. If any part of you is contemplating the prospect, then I hope a reminder of what transpired the last time around will put a stop to that. In short, you bankrupted yourself to spite me, and received nothing in return._  
_If you had any sense at all, you’d direct your attention to the troubles brewing in your borders, and not the ones across the sea. If you had no sense—and I find it frighteningly plausible that you may not—then I invite you to relive the consequences. I’m sure it would give me a good chuckle._  
_Cheers,_  
_the Crown Kingdom_

-x-

The ground was slippery beneath his feet and the wood of the musket between his fingers and England couldn’t help but think of the Revolution, with every shot fired, every city taken, every battle, every step forward and step back, fire spooking the stitched and stitched spooking the soldiers, cold setting in with teeth, cities gained and lost. He thought of New York Harbour and hated the sound of the name, thought of Saratoga and Fort York. It was a story, but it ended, it always ended in the same place.

He didn’t shoot. He could not shoot.

He slipped in the snow and knocked shoulders with the ranks of the dead, with the living, and couldn’t help but imagine the shape of this campaign, of this war, in from the east and the north, leaping cities like hopscotch, trail of bodies before and behind, until, until—

Weapon in his hands. Finger on the trigger.

It was like a story. It always ended in the same place.

He had yet to encounter America on the field.

-x-

_To the United States of America,_  
_Enclosed are terms for a full surrender on your part. I am willing to grant you autonomy, to a certain extent, in exchange for a less costly war. Part and parcel are the deferral of any elected body to the nobility and agreement to accept Crown oversight over such processes._  
_Make no mistake: while a prolonged war would cost me, it is well within my capabilities to bear. You, on the other hand, are possessed of a more limited set of resources. In that light, I recommend that you consider my terms and your options._  
_Or I suppose you could throw this into the fire, or the sea, or to the winds. Heaven knows what new means you’ll find of destroying what I send you._  
_Regards,_  
_the Crown Kingdom_

 

_To the Province of Canada,_  
_You have been given charge of the northern campaign. I trust that you will use it well._  
_—The Crown Kingdom_

-x-

His fingers picked, picked, picked at the embroidery on his sleeve, teasing apart the threads, pulling them out and letting them fall, thin red lines clinging to his jacket, bright against the weathered wooden planks of the dock—

Canada snatched his hand away and curled it into a fist.

He felt it even so, the emblem of the crown stitched on his uniform. It _chafed._

The sun was rising over the harbour, tinting the sky the faint pink of blood in water. His feet hung over the edge of the dock, swinging over the chill steel waves. In the distance he saw the silhouettes of ships, tiny, like ants, like toys, to be moved about and placed at a child’s whim.

The letter burned in his pocket.

Canada closed his eyes. In the darkness he saw a map, saw lines of red, saw possibilities and angles. Saw the beginnings of a plan he could stitch together, with familiarity as his blueprint, the pattern drawn from years and years of peering over the fence at his southward neighbour, secrets whispered between thin walls by children, ugly truths shouted across the battlefield, rough between his fingers as he wove them into a trick, a trap, a closing net, a set of chains—

He opened his eyes.

The jacket that had once seemed so big was now too tight around his shoulders. He filled his lungs with the brisk seaside air and he was _there,_ just him, filling the space, feeling with a sudden clarity the the edges of his borders, the weight of his people, his name, his footprint, his history—

—his uniform with the crown stitched on the sleeve.

_Oh,_ he thought, and remembered. _So this is war._

His fingers itched. He reached for a pencil.

-x-

_Dear America,_  
_I know that Britain’s written to you already. I think I can guess what your response was. I don’t know if I can persuade you any better than him—I don’t know if anything could persuade you at all—but I’ll try. I know I can try, at least._  
_You must’ve seen the stitched by now. You’ve seen how many of them there are. Death is cheap in battle, it shouldn’t be but it is, and it doesn’t take a lot to make a soldier from a corpse. It doesn’t take a lot to fix a soldier that’s broken. It’s so, so easy for the Crown to fill up his ranks with bodies. It’s so much harder for you. And the harder it gets for you, the easier it becomes for him._  
_There must be people on your side who’ve run the numbers, who’ve seen this. This isn’t a war you can win, not without those numbers, not without the Academy. I think you see enough that you know it, even if it’s easier to tell yourself you don’t. You’re fighting a losing battle, and the longer you fight, the more it will cost._  
_I’m guessing that to you, surrender’s not an option. You’re so stubborn you won’t even consider it. But once you aren’t fighting for victory, you’re fighting for pride, and pride only gets people killed. So please put your pride aside, and write back to him. Negotiate for better terms, if you need them. If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for your people._  
_Winter’s here. It’s wishful thinking to think that anything will be over by Christmas, or New Year’s, but maybe we can make February, we can end the war before spring flowers are here._  
_~~Not that it will~~_  
_Couldn’t we do that?_  
_Please take care,_  
_Canada_

 

_Matthew,_  
_Use a name that won’t weird out the common man, yeah? Not all of us are snow hermits, and it’s a weird thing to explain when you have people looking over your shoulder and snooping through your mail._  
_Anyways, nice try, but no dice. I know Britain’s strategy. Sweep in with overwhelming force, offer generous terms. He hasn’t changed. I’ve seen this game before, and I’m not playing it. We settle on equal footing, or not at all._  
_I know what endgame I can live with. I know what I can live with on the way there. Don’t tell me that I’m fighting for pride, okay? You have no idea what I’m fighting for._  
_You’re so certain that I’ll lose, but no one gets to play the prophet in war. Britain has overwhelming force. So what? I’ve heard that song before, too. There’s more to war than manpower. I have letters I’m waiting for replies to. I’m figuring out how everything works on your end, getting a sense of the score, testing things out to see what works and what doesn’t. I’m planning and creating and inventing. I have a lot more chips on the table in this game, and I’m giving it my all._  
_And the thing is, you were right. I’m not like you, Matt. I believe in miracles. I believe that even if the world’s lined up against you and the odds are telling you to quit and the only history at your back is the one you’re writing, there’s still a chance, if you work and struggle and sweat and_ bleed _, that you can overcome all that, and come out with what you were fighting for at the other end._  
_The funny thing is, I used to think you believed that too._  
_Stitched can’t fight a war by themselves. If my people are dying, then yours are too. And neither for a war they wanted. Think about that for a bit, eh?_  
_Merry Christmas from your brother,_  
_Alfred F Jones_

-x-

France’s reply had letters scrawled askew across the wine-stained paper, an incoherent jumble of English and French. Squinting through guttering lamplight and dawn’s pale glow, England made out _Rome, Revolution, ruine,_ and decided that France was either once again mad or drunker than he had ever seen him.

(Or maybe, maybe there was a thread of sense, buried in those lines, too deep for him to see, or he did see it, but turned away, like France had plucked his heart from his chest and shoved it before his face in its ugly crimson glory—)

England tossed the letter back onto his desk. The distinction mattered not. Mad or drunk, there would be no France to bail a rebellious colony out, because France would be headless once more before the decade was up. France had parliaments and emperors, consuls and conventions, a parade of governments vying for some ribbon, some gold, a measure of control. England had only his Crown.

In the early light streaming through the window, the parchment of the letter was the same rosy pink as the sky. A cloud of birds rose into the air, dark and raucous. Somewhere a bugle call began, the brassy morning-song that jarred men from their sleep and dreams. England rubbed his own eyes, blinked and pulled his hands away, remembered the weight of a musket across them, clearly enough that he could _feel_ it.

No France’s helping hand, no Spain toasting to Britain’s downfall and calling it _freedom,_ no Dutch Republic with holds laden with weapons. Wollstone’s ratios were his crown and scepter, his cross and sword.

(His finger hovered over the trigger).

He felt. Like the sun on his skin. The wills of his own soldiers. The strength of his own stitched. The beat of his own heart.

(No one at his back but rain.)

Were the Crown Empire to lose, there would be none to blame but himself.

-x-

Winter ceded to spring, and the rain came down in showers, miring stitched and soldier alike in mud. The rain came down, and the dead shorted out, and poisons bubbled in laboratories.

Winter ceded to spring, and America set mines beneath the skin of his land, clear-burned acres of field, collapsed narrow passes, built larger cannons, faster guns, a thousand scratches on a foe that bled so very little.

Winter ceded to spring. The war dragged on.

-x-

_Alfred,_  
_Sometimes your all isn’t good enough, okay? You can try and try and_ try. _That doesn’t mean what you try has to work._  
_The Crown can’t accept this stalemate. Something has to give soon. And you know he isn’t ever going to give._  
_You told me that you were planning and inventing and creating. You have to know the Academy is too. Every day you buy for yourself, with your fires and your weapons, you buy for them as well. Whatever the things you’re seeing now, the experiments, there’ll be something worse in a month or two or three. There’ll be more._  
_~~Even I don’t~~_  
_I’m telling you this because I wish you’d take me more seriously, that it isn’t the Revolutionary War anymore, or even 1812. You’re not the only one who’s gotten stronger. In a way, the Crown’s been ruling the world since the twenties, and war’s changed so quickly since then. I know without seeing that no one you’ve written to has sent you a good reply. If you’re planning a war, you can’t afford to look away from facts like that. You can’t replace them with dreams and ideals._  
_You said you knew what you could live with. What matters is that you_ live.  
_I don’t completely understand why it’s so terrible to you, being a colony, or having Academies, or answering to anyone else. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand. You asked me to rebel for years and never changed my mind, because words can’t change the world like that. I think I could ask you to surrender for just as long and it would change even less._  
_I know I can’t convince you. I just wish you’d do anything but fight this out until you break, until you’re hurt badly enough that you can’t anymore. I wish we could stop fighting._  
_If you won’t compromise, then at least stay alive, okay?_  
_Just know what you can bear, and survive._  
_Take care,_  
_Matthew_

 

_Matt,_  
_Don’t count me out yet._  
_And England isn’t gonna kill me._  
_—Al_

 

_Alfred,_  
_~~There was a time I would’ve~~_  
_I think you do enough counting for the both of us._  
_I hope you’re right._  
_—Matthew_

-x-

Winter ceded to spring, and the flowers bloomed, but he was far from home, too far to sow the seeds or pull the weeds or water when the rain was sparse. America set fire to his own land and Canada curled his fingers together, remembered Fort York.

He sat perched high in the branches of a tree, fingers of one hand curled around the bough that held his weight, other palm braced against the trunk, steadying him as he looked down on the tents below. It was spring, and the soldiers had made camp not far from the border, in a clearing ringed by slender trees, near a stream that whispered as it ran. A day behind them lay a train station, steam and whistles and the screech of metal on metal; days ahead lay the front lines of the war.

Yesterday and tomorrow and today, but Canada felt the farthest from _today,_ as he caught the shadows of leaves in the corner of his eye, sunlight off the stream below as it ran into the forest, history on his mind, and without buildings or trains to set the date he was unmoored, drifting, pages of the book turning back, until he was a child again.

_“Let’s play hide and seek!”_

He remembered.

His coat pinched uncomfortably around his shoulders, and he shucked it off, draping it over the branch beside him, a flag of red fabric. Without the weight, it was easier to breathe.

Without the weight, it was harder, to remember what he was supposed to be, supposed to do, to look forward and tell himself that he could place his steps without faltering, one after the other, he could keep crossing borders like nothing, cross line after line after line, he _could_ —

Generals discoursed in their tents, desks unfolded from travel, and he heard their voices, tried to hold onto them, but from his perch above they seemed small and faraway, unreal.

Leaves stirred, at the edge of his vision. His focus frayed like a tattered coat.

_“You can hide first!”_

Looking around made it harder, when his eyes caught on the trees and he remembered their forms a century or more previous, how tall they’d looked from younger eyes, how deep and inviting the shadows between them. Looking around made him _smaller,_ as if he was still the height of England’s knee, and he had played in this clearing, once upon a time, smiled and climbed those trees, almost drowned in that stream, more than a century previous, when he was a child, and there had been no national border, only British North America, only the two of them—

He remembered.

His fingers itched.

_...failure to thrive…_

Leaves rustled. Water whispered over stones. A sound was coming unwoven from them, a new thread, filtering into his awareness, spooling into voices, syllables, words.

_...did you see that?..._

A distant murmuring, growing closer.

_…came out of nowhere..._

Canada’s alarm was mild and brief: they were his people. It was safe.

_Is it?_

_...potential…_

Frowning, he strained his ears to listen, but caught no banter, none of the casual conversation he might’ve expected, only technical discussions and practical matters, every voice steeped in exhaustion.

_...adjust the fourth ratio…_

_...these are heavy…_

He saw soldiers pass by through the branches below, limping back to camp in a flow, a river, with slumped shoulders and stretchers held between them, coats bright and bloody against the grass. Some were held up, legs bound or splinted, injured limbs pressed against bodies, and others were led along as they stared blankly ahead, at some battlefield that never disappeared.

Canada’s hand tightened on the branch as bodies were laid out in rows.

Too many bodies.

America’s presence was abruptly overpowering, as if his brother was leaning on him, peering over his shoulder. Blue coats, among the red. _Give them back,_ demanded the America of his imagination. _Look what you’ve done._

_There’ll be something worse in a month or two or three,_ Canada had written, like prophecy.

_What happened?_

Bodies. Injured in ways that weren’t musket ball or bayonet wound, bomb or fist. Claws and teeth and acid.

Their faces, like faces blurring through his mind as he reached for his people, those of the old, and of the too, too young.

There was a time he would’ve cried to see them. There was a time they would’ve stolen his breaths. There was a time he would’ve rushed back to England _(France),_ sniffling, eyes huge with new horror, _fix it, fix it,_ and they would’ve, they would’ve—

But the new had become the old, and he had grown up, like a nations did when they were watered with blood, leafing out crimson. His heart ached to see the faces, but it couldn’t reach across the distance, couldn’t get past the colour of a coat that wasn’t his own. If it bled, it was only over his own hands.

_Remember?_

_This is what it means to war._

Faces. Looking up at the sky. The last thing they’d ever see still caught in their eyes.

His gaze was drawn to the face of a blue-coated soldier with blond hair and broken glasses.

_It’s not America,_ he reminded himself. It wasn’t America. He listed the ways until the page overflowed. The chin was too harsh. The nose was too long. The hair the wrong style. Too tall of a forehead. Too frightened an expression. He had a list of reasons and none of it mattered. Dull-coated doctors were gathering the stretchers. He was sitting in a tree and he was watching it happen.

Something itched. It felt like eyes looking over his shoulder, fixed on the back of his neck. It felt like judgment.

Eyes aimed upward at the sky.

_Are you there?_

No.

Down below.

Canada looked down, but caught nothing through the branches, and so he grabbed his coat and scrambled down from the tree, hands against bark, foot after foot and branch after branch after another, until he landed on solid ground once more with a _thump._

The woodland trees grew tall and thick. All he could see between their trunks was dappled sunlight. Water burbled. Leaves rustled.

An itch.

A _tug._

“...America?”

His voice came out like a whisper.

Twigs cracked, deeper in the forest.

Canada took a step after the sound, then another, venturing into the trees, footfalls soundless in the leaf cover. Leaves brushed against his face as he pushed branches aside. His path traced the gentle curve of the stream.

“America?” he called, again.

A branch snapped, somewhere in that wood, and someone gasped, a sound half-breath, half-sob. Canada heard a _splash_ and broke into a jog.

“America!”

The stream curved sharply; his path didn’t. Canada skidded down the bank and stumbled into the shallows. Downstream, a great log tumbled away on the current.

Across, a flash of movement.

Canada’s feet splashed through the water. He made it a third of the way across the stream before the current grew deep and swift enough that he feared for his footing. Throwing his arms out for balance, he searched the trees and found only shadows. Only light.

He was a string stretched taut across the water, and he couldn’t stretch to the other side.

Leaves crunched. The string yanked, _snapped._ Canada lifted his foot for another step forward but the current surged, threatening to unroot him, and he hastily planted it back in the streambed, remembering water flooding his lungs some long-ago day.

Then there was no one _there_ that he could feel anymore, above or below or across, no sense of _presence,_ no itch or tug, no eyes, only footsteps, the sound or echo of them, one after the other, running.

Sunlight poured down through the leaves.

_He sat curled up in the depths of a dense bush, pricked by stray twigs, leaves tangling into his hair. They rustled when he moved, so he didn’t, only sat there, arms hugging his knees, still but for his breaths._

_He heard America’s footsteps, quick at first as he ran, then slowing, heavier as he tromped around the forest, looking, then quicker again, as he decided that there was nothing to be found there, and moved on—_

_“Canada? Canada, come out, let’s play something else, I’m bored…”_

_America could never find him._

_“Canada…”_

_America never gave up._

_“Can you even hear me?”_

_America got bored, and when he got bored he would call for Canada to come out, and pull him into some other game. But America was clever, and when he saw Canada, before the beginning of the next game, he would say “Found you!”, as if he had really found him, as if he really_ could _find him, and he would laugh, as if it was all a joke. America always had to have the last word._

_America was clever, but Canada was cleverer. If he stayed in the bush with twigs digging into his skin and leaves in his hair, if he stayed still, so the leaves didn’t rustle and the twigs didn’t break, then he was invisible, and silent, and America would never find him._

_If America couldn’t find him, America couldn’t win. And if he couldn’t win, he would have to admit that he had lost._

“Are you there?”

_Canada stayed where he was, breathing, and doing little else._

_The sun moved across the sky._

America did not reply.

No one could afford to lose.

_He was alone._

He remembered.

 

-x-

_To the United States of America,_

England’s pen stuttered on the paper. A scream broke the air, another, another, somewhere beyond, in the infirmary where the doctors worked, or from some far-off battlefield, or in the confines of his own mind, echoing as long as history.

_To the United States of America,_

Inkblots stained the paper. No words.

There was no resolution.

-x-

_Ah, my dear Angleterre,_  
_You did so always have the habit of winning the battle and losing the war._  
_Tell me, has he written back to you yet?_  
_Love from belle Paris_  
_P.-S. Mathieu does not seem to be receiving my letters. Please do remind him to trim his roses. They become horribly overgrown at times, and the thorns are quite vicious._

 

_Hey, Canada,_  
_If you were telling the truth about not wanting to fight me, then now would be a great time to prove it._  
_Do it for your people, huh?_  
_—America_

-x-

The fronts were moving, at last, after weeks or months of stalemate, fire and water and mud, steel against flesh. The front was moving, corpses to corpses, front to front. All that was comfort.

All that was comfort, yet all he felt was dread.

They moved in the rain, through mist pale and thick, on foot, on horses, on creatures and vehicles. An ache was settling in the Crown Kingdom’s bones, the ache of strain day after night after day, the ache of war. If he closed his eyes he could imagine any other battlefield, Seven Years or Napoleonic or the Revolution, some spring or autumn or winter of downpour and struggle. Old wounds twinged and new ones burned.

If he moved then he could bear it, like rain off his skin, soaking into his coat. If he moved then he had _direction,_ had momentum, had a course that he was charting. If he moved, then that pain was in service to a goal.

If the price was right, then he could pay it. If he marked time, then he could remember that behind the fog lay the sun, and beyond the horizon lay the world entire.

Empires were not born to surrender.

With the clouds overhead and haze in every direction, it was impossible to tell how long they had been marching, whether it was still morning, or past noon, or even later, falling off towards the evening. Through the mist he saw horses in dark raincoats, hooded figures of black-coated doctors, the muzzles of cannons, trees with branches reaching for the sky. Little beyond but pale grey void, and what he could see was warped by the water, darkened and twisted and bleak.

Voices whispered, and promise of the future was mirage in the face of the present.

England’s feet made footprints in ashes and burned growth, marks quickly wiped away by rain. The drops were cold on the back of his neck. His footing slipped. They were moving forward.

He was moving forward, yet at times he felt as if he was moving towards a fall, towards the edge of cliff. He couldn’t see the way forward, he couldn’t see the other side. Nothing but mist and grey, and at times a figure too familiar, the tilt of a head, echo of a voice among the rainfall, and he knew, he knew that weapons were meant to be _used—_

Carts and horses. Hoods and shadows. The long, slow trudge of a journey he could not afford to stop making.

He could not afford to lose the war.

He couldn’t imagine what it would mean. What it would be like to reckon with the cost, and what it would knock askew in his eyes, for all they had done to be have been for nothing, for ashes. He never, ever wanted to know.

There was only one way forward that he could see.

The rain was cold on his face. In the haze of mist he saw figures. Saw a face. Saw an enemy.

He would have to be able to do anything.

Lines full of opponents, and only one that mattered.

He would have to be able to do something.

War rested heavy on his bones, and there was no respite, there would never be.

He would have to be able to—

A bird screamed overhead, to the rumble of distant thunder, and the sound resolved itself into words, into accusation, into _mercy, mercy, fall and burn, leave and never return._

It was impossible to imagine.

-x-

_To the United States of America,_  
_I once again enclose terms of surrender. As the progress of the war has seemed not to your favour, I hope that you will make a calm and clear-headed assessment as to what will best benefit your land and populace._  
_In any case, I expect to encounter you sooner or later. It is entirely in your hands whether this is on the field of battle or under terms of truce._  
_Regards,_  
_the Crown Kingdom_

-x-

“Pass me the scalpel.”

Canada drew the tool from the open kit on the stool before him and handed it to the grey-coated doctor, who stood over a young man lying prone on a steel table. White drapes separated them from the rest of the field hospital. He glimpsed blood and flesh, indistinct, before he looked away.

_Coward._

He breathed through his mouth, once, twice, steady.

“Pliers.”

Canada passed the pliers with one hand, keeping the other poised over the medical kit, ready to provide whatever was asked of him. This time he kept his eyes fixed downwards on his hand, at the tools. Not looking upward. Not ahead.

(He couldn’t help but look, anyways, at a surgeon’s work, at a limb cut open.)

_You did this._

_He’s yours._

Oblivion, bleeding, like ink in water.

“Syringe.”

Canada’s hand brushed the surgeon’s glove as he passed the syringe, and he withdrew it to find blood congealed on his fingers, bright red and sticky. Instead of wiping the liquid away, he found himself studying it, noting hue and viscosity with a distant, clinical sort of fascination.

_Look._

_Isn’t this what you wanted?_

“Aqua verna.”

A little green bottle, the label hand-written. Canada reached for it, then paused mid-motion, frowning.

“Aqua nuciferum?”

“Aqua _verna._ ”

The doctor’s voice was impatient, but Canada’s hand still hesitated over the bottle, stayed by memories of other doctors, other surgeries. “That’s not for medical use.”

“That’s not for you to decide, boy.”

Smears of red swam over his fingers. In the reflection of green bottle-glass Canada saw dark fabric, glass tanks, lab notes in ruinous scrawl. “It’s for making—” He bit his tongue. “It causes mutations. Makes cells grow too fast, makes them change. If you have the clotting powder and the aqua nucifera, then why would—don’t you need—”

“Just _pass it._ ”

_No,_ thought a part of Canada, but it was a small part, outweighed by the rest of him that recognized the folly of arguing in a hospital, with a medical professional, in the middle of a _surgery._ He held out the bottle, carefully, as if it was an egg, and the doctor snatched it from his hand, muttering something harsh under his breath.

Tubes moved, in the corner of his vision.

“The usage is experimental,” explained the doctor, terse, the loose ends of words clipped away. “Cell growth is facilitated, recovery is accelerated, with some side effects. The current aim is to take log of those side effects. The standard subject is male. This age. Avulsion to an extremity.”

Like with three simple descriptors, you could clip-clip your way to the heart of a person.

“Did you ask him?”

“What?”

Canada looked up at the back of the doctor’s head, at blond hair curling. “Ask him. If he wanted to be—experimented on.”

“He arrived unconscious.”

“But if you—”

“I’m a _doctor._ My job is to return soldiers to fighting condition and find ways to expedite that process, not fuss about their feelings.”

“That’s not okay,” said Canada.

The doctor looked at him. His gaze was the pressure of the sky before a storm, that time when birds flew low. . “What was that?”

Canada swallowed. “You’re supposed to—doctors are supposed to ask.”

The doctor studied him for a long moment. Canada felt the weight of that disapproval settle on his shoulders, like the sky, like snow, like hands, and he didn’t squirm, not an inch, wondered if that was self-control or fear’s cold _do not dare._

“Look,” the doctor said, “maybe you should take a walk. I can manage by myself.”

The chill in his tone made it clear the suggestion wasn’t much of a suggestion at all. Still, Canada lingered. “I—”

“ _Leave._ ”

_Don’t interrupt me,_ thought Canada, but the words were very far from his mouth. The doctor’s hands were gloved in blood. A man lay cut open on the steel table, incision gaping open to the air. _Don’t interrupt me,_ but his words felt like feathers, like ashes.

_Refuse,_ cajoled a part of of him, _stay, argue,_ maybe that was what America would’ve done, but somewhere there was a river, and—

_—we’re not as alike as—_

The doctor glared at him and he backed away, hands half-raised in unconscious surrender, ducking out from the curtains that enclosed the surgical theatre, back into the crush of people filling the field hospital.

A babble of voices engulfed him, patients questioning, doctors reassuring, patients screaming, doctors shouting, patients moaning, curses and prayers both. Shoulders and elbows jostled against his own. White and grey and black coats moved among the hospital beds, across his path, around him, like birds in spring molt, growing darker as the months dragged on. The air was filled with the stench of blood and worse. He couldn’t breathe.

For a moment he was lost, rudderless.

Voices screamed in the back of his head. They had been screaming for a long time. He remembered a book heavy and old between his hands, a book of medical ethics. From a glance it was impossible to tell whether any given patient was his or Britain’s or America’s, only that they were all either suffering or unconscious or dead.

_Who are you and you will you—_

Through the crush of people he caught a glimpse of the exit. A chink of clear blue sky.

_Fresh air._

His heart leaped.

Someone dressed in a lab assistant’s uniform shoved past him with a tray, nearly knocking him off his feet. Someone swore loud and vicious in an accent from America’s South. Canada looked down at his hands and saw the blood smeared on his fingers. Saw that he was standing in some liquid he couldn’t identify.

_You’re not done yet,_ he thought.

“You there! C’mere!” called another doctor, and he obeyed.

-x-

It was dusk by the time he left that tent. Night crept in from the east; day faded from the west. The edges of everything were soft and blurred, smudged out into long, all-consuming shadows.

Canada breathed in the fresh spring air and couldn’t find it in himself to appreciate it.

His fingers itched. They itched to be doing something, anything. Inside his pocket was a neatly-folded stack of letters unfinished and unsent and damaged in frustration. There was no solution in writing.

Instead Canada found a rock to seat himself upon, threaded a needle, laid his coat over his knee, and took stitches to its tears and seams.

His needle moved through layers of fabric, piercing, mending, tension, release, again, again, until gradually the motions turned to muscle memory. He settled into the rhythm like a leaf floating on a stream. Time stretched and drip-drip-dripped away in grains of sand, in water beneath the sun. Shadows smudged out; it grew colder. He remained.

The side of his hand brushed up against the stitched emblem of the Crown. He remembered a surgery.

_I’ll still be here._

His stitches fell small and neat and precise. Wounds closed; harms were remedied. Every frayed divide was brought back into harmony.

There was a place where people went to be healed, a place of white curtains and glass bottles. The bird-masked doctors wielded their tools and medicines and worked small miracles with time, buying another day, another year, another lifetime.

The needle gleamed in the dim light as he worked, bright and thin as a wire woven into flesh.

There was a place where people went to die. They were laid out flat on rows of cold metal tables, surrounded by the stench and the blood and doctors with too much to do and not enough to care about, a place of knives and shouting. That was where they died, staring up at what was not the sky, until their flesh turned to clay and their eyes to glass.

He looped the thread around and around. His hand hurt.

He couldn’t seem to stop.

There was a place where people went to be made into something new. They were cut up and put back together differently, pieces missing, pieces added, flesh and metal, flesh and flesh. “Isn’t this a miracle?” cried the birds, and he nodded until his head fell off. They said that you learned by doing.

The thread ran out, snapped taut.

He was no longer stitching.

Canada blinked, and found his hand pinned tight against the coat, entangled in a red thread, pulled from the spool, torn from the seams he’d made, picked from the embroidery on his coat, wrapped around and around his fingers, over his knuckles, somehow everywhere without him having noticed, biting into skin, leaving him not an inch of freedom without some form of destruction, of coat or thread or flesh.

(There was so little he could afford to lose.)

He saw the play of tendons across his hand. The shadows of veins beneath his skin. Scrubbed raw and deceptively clean.

_I’ll still be here,_ he thought, words like snow, like feathers, like string.

Canada fumbled blindly through the darkness. He found a pair of scissors.

-x-

_To the Crown Kingdom,_  
_The northern campaign has reached most of its objectives. With your permission, I’ll cede our captured ground to your officers and start withdrawing before season’s end. There are troubles at home, and I can’t take the same losses you can._  
_The ports and railways and post offices will still be open. This won’t interfere with supply or training or intelligence. I don’t mean to abandon your troops, only to change how I’m contributing._  
_Please don’t give up on negotiations with America. He’s stubborn, but he wants what’s best for his people. ~~I hope~~ I know he does. If one of us can find the right words, we can end this without needless bloodshed, without hurting him too badly. We just have keep trying._  
_Good luck,_  
_The Province of Canada_

 

_To the Province of Canada,_  
_You may withdraw as suggested, barring contingents to be sent to bolster the east (quantities and locations marked on attached map). Your current rate of supply is sufficient, although I anticipate an increased demand for ammunition and specialized laboratory equipment in the near future._  
_War fosters unrest. If your troubles are again with the republicans, then I suppose you can no longer direct them to an amenable government in the south; perhaps they ought to be instead reminded of the folly of treason. If it is the French that trouble you then I trust that numbers will win out in the end, and in the meantime I shall be grateful not to share your predicament._  
_Thank you for your aid in this matter._  
_Regards,_  
_The Crown Kingdom_

-x-

It was past midnight in a fort of silent, sleeping officers, but in London the sun was rising, mothers calling children for breakfast, men heading out to work, and the sun was rising, it never, ever set—

England threaded the sturdy needle by dim, guttering lamplight, missed the eye once, twice, thrice before the thread went through. He worked the needle into a length of heavy linen twill and formed one stitch, another, a line, embroidery.

Red, on white stained yellow.

The needle wove in and out of the fabric, looping threads into a shape, into an outline, and he tried to lose himself in the rhythm of his work, but it was morning in London, and his thoughts were scattered and flighty, like flocks of pigeons startled into the sky.

_Someone aims and fires, bang, bang, birds falling—_

The thread snagged.

There was a time he’d carved toy soldiers for America. There was a time he’d travelled the world to bring him flowers.

Knots formed.

There was a time he’d read him bedtime stories to lull him to sleep, stories of heroes slaying monsters, when the night was old in London and young on this foreign shore, and enemies were waiting across the sea—

_You're not leaving, are you?_

He raised the needle and couldn’t think of where to place it next, stabbed it through the linen anyways, stitched on, the rhythm of his work falling into the frantic pulse of his heart.

The night was dead in London, now. It was old on this foreign shore.

He grew closer to triumph by the day, but those days only ever drifted further away.

The thread snagged, again. This time he couldn’t pull it free.

Shapes, in the shadows.

Shapes, embroidered, like the edges of a country on a map, jagged and wobbly by nature, straight and angular by artifice. England stitched the edge of a red petal and found his hands unsteady, the shape wild, warped, coming apart.

Everything coming apart.

The edge of the cliff loomed. The battlefield, waiting. He still couldn’t see a way forward, couldn’t find his way through, like threading a needle blind, metal slippery and elusive between fingertips, struggling to string together a victory.

The needle moved in and out of the fabric. Clumsy, imperfect stitches. He tried, again, again, yet the shape of it was all wrong, his every attempt coming out warped, ruined.

His hand shook. The metal slipped.

_The bayonet shifted in his hands, wood slippery against skin slick with blood and rain._

The needle pricked his finger.

_Metal blade catching on wood, flashing like a needle in the dark, a blow deflected, feet slipping in the mud._

The needle pricked his finger, again.

_Dread, cold and fluid like the downpour. Weapon upraised._

_He knew was he was supposed to do._

_He could not move._

_He did not move._

The needle stabbed into his finger for the third time, and blood welled, red on red, a drop, but England saw, a gush, a fountain, a field of flowers. He saw the edge of a cliff.

_You fool._

_That is how a war is lost._

Blood welled. He was a map of veins and arteries, chambers of air, factories of bone, each part of the structure moving in harmony, serving its intended purpose.

_He had to be able to—_

It was a fault of his nature that he had been given a heart.

 

-x-

_America,_  
_I’m going home. I missed it, these past few months, but I always knew that it was safe, and well, and that my people could live their lives without having to be afraid. I’m sorry that you can’t say the same. I wish you could._  
_Sometimes it feels like there are always tensions between us, like there’s always just been a war or always will be a fight looming in the future, because Britain’s Britain and I can’t help being British any more than you can help being you, and neither of us got to pick our battles. Sometimes it feels like we’ve always been watching our backs and watching our borders, and it’s almost silly to think that once upon a time we weren’t._  
_I wish it could stop being that way. I wish the two of you or your leaders could work something out. You’ve talked about war like games and scores and chips on the table, but we don’t get a full deck in our hand. We can only play the cards we have. Sometimes that means we can’t win, in the end. Sometimes we can only cut our losses._  
_Please watch out for yourself. The battlefield only gets more dangerous by the day._  
_Take care,_  
_Canada_

 

_Canada,_  
_Don’t make me laugh. You’re talking about watching our backs and our borders? Yeah, this is what I was watching out for. When the colony of a world superpower is sitting right across your border, you get a little twitchy, ‘cause you can’t forget how that in the end, you’re part of the_ world.  
_And don’t talk to me about being helpless. The whole entire reason I’m me is because it turned out I could help being British after all. Maybe you can’t. Fine. No room for me to talk with the way the war’s going right now. But there’s a lot that goes on between claiming an identity for your own and full-on rebelling against it._  
_You say you’re British? You’re British. You say you’re my brother? You’re my brother. You want to be both? That’s a little trickier to balance. I say you’ve been doing a pretty decent job of it so far. But it isn’t going to get any easier._  
_Fact of the matter is, you can’t just claim everyone as your family. At some point, you have to pick and choose your sides. You have to decide which part of you gets to make the decisions. I’d like it if it’s a part of you that’s accountable to your people, that can stand up to the Crown a little, that can shake hands with me. But you know what? In the end, it’s your choice._  
_Take it from me, though: it’s pretty damn hard to be two people at once._  
_Figure yourself out, Canada. Because I’m sure not about to._  
_Sincerely,_  
_The United States of America_  
_P.S. If Britain had asked me to play cards for everything I owned, you can bet I would’ve said no. Too bad he wasn’t kind enough to give me that option, huh?_

-x-

The snow was long gone from the streets, and when Canada looked around he saw that scarves and boots had been replaced by lighter fashions. It was bright, beneath the summer sun, bright like the season had opened its eyes and stretched and blinked and smiled like forests burning. Children chased each other with imaginary swords. Passersby made way for a tall man in a dark coat. A lady weeding her flowerbeds smiled and and waved as he passed, and he started, because he hadn’t though he’d walked with so heavy a step.

Canada didn’t look back as he navigated the familiar streets.

(He didn’t dare look back.)

His house looked the same as ever, gabled roof and unused chimney, the walls two seasons older, the yard two seasons wilder. His neighbour stood waiting for him outside that yard, one foot tapping in benign impatience. He held out a ring of keys as Canada approached.

“Thank you for looking after the house,” said Canada, accepting the keys. They clinked cold and heavy into his hand.

“Some fox raided the henhouse last winter,” replied the neighbour. “We lost a few. I’m sorry, lad.”

The keys weighed cold and heavy in his hand, and Canada curled his fingers around them, felt the edges dig into his skin, wondered if it would bruise or if the metal would warp before then.

“It’s all right,” he lied.

The neighbour nodded at him, then brushed past as he departed. Canada flinched at the brief pat of a hand on his shoulder.

_We lost a few._

Everyone lost.

He heard chickens clucking as he walked the path around his flowerbeds, the sound somehow fainter than before. Roses grew tall and wild and straggly around a weathered front door. For a moment he paused on the threshold, key in keyhole, before turning it, giving the door a sharp tug to dislodge creeping tendrils.

The door creaked open on rusted hinges, loud as a nightmare, like the opening to a tomb.

Stepping inside, Canada transferred his keys into his pocket and removed a sheaf of letters, then stripped off his coat and hung it on the rack, movements deliberate and mechanical. Every bump and step echoed loud as a declaration in the silent house.

A bear pawed at his ankle. Canada stooped to pick him up.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Felt claws, light through the fabric on his shirt.

“I know,” he murmured. “I know. I’m sorry.”

_I’m sorry I ever left._

Bear under one arm and letters in his free hand, Canada proceeded down the hallway, pausing outside the sitting room but passing it by. Instead he ascended the claustrophobic stairs to the second floor and, passing the guest bedroom, opened the second door on his left, revealing a small, dusty room. Afternoon sunlight streamed in from a large window on the far wall. Below the window sat a desk; on that desk rested an inkwell and a pile of stationery. Cabinets and maps occupied one wall; shelving, the other. Canada’s gaze snagged on the single flag and for a moment he saw stars, saw a cross, saw a burst of jagged leaves—

He blinked.

It was flowers.

It had always been flowers.

Of course.

He looked down before he blinked again. Studying the floorboards, he made his way over to the desk and seated himself, setting the bear on the desktop. Leaning over, he pulled open the desk drawer labelled _War,_ revealing rows of dense folders, and filed his letters by date.

Then there was nothing to do but sit.

For the same reason he’d been unable to look back on the street below, he couldn’t bring himself to look out the window now. Pins sprouted across maps, but there was no more command for him to wield, nothing he could _do_ that hadn’t already been done. A few books rested on the shelves, but in the south Britain and America were trying to pick each other to pieces, and the thought of sitting and enjoying some novel seemed unbearable.

A small room, away from the noises of the world below, with natural light, and cabinets, and stationery. He’d thought it might be good for paperwork, once, but the paperwork had never really come.

There had been wars.

There had always been wars.

The edges of his borders jostled against each other, river broad and ocean coast. He was made of pieces, the same way America had been, before. Maybe they’d been cut from the same cloth. Maybe that was why Canada had spent so long watching their border, worrying, worrying, worrying that any day some clash of personalities and interests would trample that line in the sand into nothing, into footprints.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about being annexed anymore, huh?” he found himself asking, voice small and shaky and cobwebbed over.

The words echoed impossibly loud in the silence. The bear looked at him, wordless.

_Is that what you were worried about?_ asked the tilt of his head.

Somehow that fact that he’d admitted the fear made it worse, as if by speaking it aloud he’d brought it into the light, as if the absence of that one possibility only opened up a wealth of others, and was that _why_ , was that really why he had -- he had --

“I remember how quickly he grew, you know.” The words spilled out like a venesection. “So many of the things I wanted, he _had,_ just like that. He made it seem so terrible and so simple. Like you could spill some blood and become a nation. And I told myself my way was going to be different. It was going to be bloodless. I told myself, if I waited, and worked hard, I could have that too, someday. And now…”

The bear regarded him calmly. Silence demanded to be filled.

“I can’t tell where any of us are headed anymore.”

No reply to that but a blink.

_Who can?_

When they were children, he and America had raised castles from beach sand, and they’d known even then that what they built wasn’t immortal. Now Canada was older, and he was learning, had been learning for months, years, decades, that plans were like sandcastles; you could build them as well as you could, but sometimes you tripped over one, or your brother knocked one over, or the tide came in and swept them away, and there was nothing to do but make more.

He knew that he could make, had to make more, but America was gone now, and the tide was rising around his ankles, and it was hard to forget drowning.

Coats fraying. Skin scrubbed raw. His layers were peeling off, a few layers deeper and he’d be able to see the true shape of his bones, he didn’t know what he was made of. He didn’t know what he’d find. If they’d fall apart under pressure, pieces clattering to the earth, back to sand, back to water. If they’d be someone else’s he was borrowing. If there’d be nothing at all under the surface but flesh and veins and blood, his brother’s, his own, spilling out over his hands like dye, like guilt—

Canada looked out into the future and he was afraid. He was afraid to be unready, without knowing what he was readying for. He was afraid that something had been hurt and it had been hurt in a messy way, shards embedded and infection deep, until there was nothing for the surgeon to say but _chop, chop._ He was afraid that he did not exist and that someone important would notice.

Republicans and French and English and loyalists, voices crowding out his thoughts, and he pressed one hand to one ear, as if checking his hearing, as if blocking out a sound, but the song rang on in his bones, high enough to shatter glass, _Who are you and who will you—_

Canada grasped. Reached out, for solid ground, and found a pen, found an inkwell, found stationery, dipped nib in ink and tried to string together a remedy, a solution, a hand reached out into the dark for cues.

_Dear America,_

_Are you_

It was wrong. He crossed out a word, scrawled another in the margins, crossed the first word out again, again, messily, too messily to read, tried to continue writing but found inkblots on his paper, swallowing letters and syllables and whole words. He reached for more paper, found a fresh page, a new leaf, wrote, but the paragraph rambled without clear rhyme or reason, and he turned a new page and started fresh, but he sounded too solemn, too cheerful, too childish, his writing was too messy, a explanation too much like an excuse, a request too much like rebellion, the wrong language, the right language, and he turned, and he turned, and he wrote.

(He wrote).

He was sitting at a little desk in a little room, a window before him, a flag to his right. Shadows stretched long and dark across the desktop, smeared-out, all-consuming. His left hand ached; his right held the pen. His mouth was dry. His stomach grumbled.

A white paw pressed down on his left wrist.

“Stop that,” said the bear, nearly inaudible through the ringing in his ears.

White fur and dark shadows, steeped in light that was—

— _so much redder than he remembered—_

—amber-orange.

Disorientation settled, dreamlike, like floating, a sense of unreality at the thousand small changes which had taken place: the positions of inkwells, the colour of the light, the crick in his back.

His hands ached.

They were strewn over the surface of the desk. Piled thick like autumn leaves. He stood, chair legs scraping against the floorboards, for a better view of the catastrophe. Letters, and the drafts of letters, layers and stacks of them, some hanging off the edges of the desk, some lying on the floor, neat, messy, crumpled, smoothed-out, some French, some English, some a single sentence isolated on a blank page, others spanning pages and crowded to the margins. Drawers had been pulled out and gaped open, files half-removed and stuffed back in the wrong order, a litany of years poking up their heads.

Everything gone to pieces.

His hands ached. From writing, Canada realized. He reached for the memory of the writing and found nothing, as if it had simply imploded, folded itself up and disappeared, never to be found.

As neatly as a letter.

_Is this what happens?_ he wondered, and couldn’t tell if he was thinking of nations or people.

The bear looked at him, eyes dark, no answers to be found.

Canada looked up at the window. After all the _I can’ts,_ after all the worries, all it took was a movement of his head. It wasn’t so hard to find the truth, when you were willing to see it.

A face floated disembodied against the glass, pale and fearful and transparent, a ghost staring back at him, beseeching, from some cold and narrow world. Beyond that ghost burned an orange sky, and against against that sky sprawled a silhouette skyline, gabled rooftops and unused chimneys, buildings cut from crisp shadow.

There it was, among those buildings. Like a tree in full summer glory, reaching out towards that fiery sky. Looming over his shoulder, with branches stretching out before him, shape known even when he was turned away.

(The beating heart of it all).

The Academy.

He was looking at it. He was looking at himself. He couldn't seem to—

“Stop it,” said the bear, again.

His heart pounded in his ears.

“ _Stop_ it,” and Canada tore his eyes from the window, cast them back down to the floorboards, his footprints in the dust between light and shadow.

He swallowed.

“Okay,” he said, his voice small and strange and scratchy.

_Okay,_ he told himself. _You’re okay. You’re fine._

On the most basic level, that of flesh and blood and people and economy, he _was_.

(Hadn’t the textbooks laid it out so simple, the secrets to winning the world, a few ratios and a few pounds of flesh, but move beyond that and suddenly everything was blood—)

“Okay,” he said, again, more to himself that anything.

_You’re fine._

_Haven’t you gotten so tall?_

Letters old and new littered the floor around his desk.

_Haven’t you made such a mess?_

He knelt. The letters slipped between his fingers like water, but he gathered them. Tried to gather them. Gathered them the best he could.

A ringing filled his ears, high enough to shatter glass, like the echo of some bell that went on and on.

Canada stood, sheaf of unfinished letters in his hands. He tapped them into order against his desk. More drafts covered the surface, like leaves, like snowdrifts, and he tried to gather them too, sift through them, sort them out into drawers, into folders, into piles, like he could smooth creases into invisibility, return ink to the inkwell. As if he could turn back seasons in tidy edges and crinkling paper, turn a fresh page and know all the words to the story, as comfortable as a well-worn coat, a parable.

For a long time he’d thought he could see a path into the future. He’d thought that if he followed it, he’d end where he belonged. But there was no path, no lighted trail, only trees rising tall and slender, sometimes a footprint, sometimes a river.

Dates and salutations and signatures passed before his eyes. He tried to return everything to its proper place, but the words bled out like ink in water.

Nothing was the same as before.

He was standing in the light with papers in his hands, but the shadows were deep and the weather uncertain. Letters were leaves and leaves were snowdrifts. A window shattered in Montreal. He couldn’t see what tomorrow would bring. He couldn’t see how the war would end.

_This is who I am and who I will—_

He couldn’t see what and where and who he’d be at the end of it.

 

-x-

_America,_  
_You don’t have to tell me anything, but please just write back to me. It’s hard to get news of the war. Britain isn’t replying to my letters. I’m sitting at home and piecing together stories and guessing, but every guess is a shot in the dark. I don’t know where you are and where you’re doing and I guess I’m not supposed to. I guess you don’t owe me anything. But I would like to know if you’re all right._  
_Please write back to me so I know you still can._  
_—Canada_

 

_Mexico,_  
_Look, I know there’s bad blood between us. I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. But I figure there’s one thing we can agree on: that we’re damn too close on the map._  
_I won’t spell it out for you. You know what’s going on. The Crown’s trying to plant its flag every hill the sun touches. Right now that hill is mine. But from mine? There’s a pretty good view of yours._  
_If you want to secure your border, then join the war and help me beat him back. If you want compensation, if you want a favour or payback or whatever, then fine, fair’s fair. But save that for after the war, unless you want to wake up with the Crown’s boot in your face._  
_‘Til next time,_  
_The United States of America_

 

_To the United States of America,_  
_After the war, you will be his. I'm in no position to throw away the lives of my people on a doomed struggle. As long your fortunes remain tipped towards defeat, that position_ cannot _change._  
_I offer neither condolences nor condemnations. Either would be empty. For the present moment, your neighbors have abandoned or turned against you. Occupy yourself with your own borders, and not mine, because your fate rests in your hands alone._  
_I am attentive as to what becomes of it._  
_Buena suerte,_  
_The Mexican Empire_

-x-

The musket came apart in pieces, lock, stock, barrel, ramrod, assorted odds and ends collected in a pile, a longer part sent skidding into the shadows. Black powder stained the wood and metal of the weapon, speckling the ground, dirtying his hands, dark smears and crumbling clumps, like coal, like ash.

England poured water from his canteen, drop by drop, over the lock of the musket, then wiped it away with a linen cloth, revealing the metal beneath the powder. He repeated the process with the barrel, attaching the cloth to a metal musket worm so as to access the interior.

His hands remembered the motions, and he watched as they soaked and swabbed and rinsed and disassembled, mechanically, the movements somehow just beyond his conscious control, familiar enough that no thought was required to complete them.

Thought came to him, nonetheless, in the form of a vision, of a figure standing at the edge of a cliff, looking out over a sea of monsters, all clamouring for him to fall.

England dipped his cloth in oil. He wiped down the wood of the musket barrel.

A door slammed in his memory. It slammed half a year ago, a winter day in Canada, the echoes of laughter falling around him in lieu of snow. It slammed nearly a century before, America storming from a house on his colonial shore, leaving a teacup in shards on the floor. It closed, with a _click_ louder than any slam, as he pulled it shut behind himself one cold and rainy evening, leaving two young colonies slumbering upstairs, unwoken and unaware.

England began to work rust and grime off the lock of the musket.

Empires. They bled. They bled others. They fell.

He could do the first two, or he could do the last.

He could do the first two, and then the last.

It was all entwined, the rise and the fall, the blade and the blood, impossible to tease apart, to make sense of. Pull one thread, and the embroidery would unravel.

Using an oiled cloth, England buffed the metal of the lock.

He was standing in the mist, with paths closing themselves off around him. He couldn’t see where his path led. He couldn’t see the end.

It was all too easy to lose himself.

To lose it all.

Hubbub, outside his tent. Voices raised, people moving, gathering.

His hands paused in their work.

A horn sounded.

Putting down cloth and musket, England rose and slipped from the tent, blinking into the noon light. Among the tents he saw soldiers in red, shading their faces with their hands; saw doctors in black with blood on theirs from interrupted work. Every head turned to the west, and he turned his as well, trying to see what they saw.

A distant horse, pristine coat gleaming in the sunlight, fast approaching.

As it drew closer, the rider.

England sank to his knees, and around him others did the same, soldiers in red and doctors in black, head bowed, all equal in submission.

Staring at the grass, he could see neither horse nor rider, but he could hear the hoofbeats, growing louder and louder, until they stopped.

Only breaths, in the silence, like conversation, like the calm before the storm.

“Soldiers of the Empire.”

Her voice was honey spun from sunlight, sweet and rich and at the very edge of humanity’s potential, the voice of a singer who came once a century.

The voice of a Noble.

“Wherefore do you fight?”

The question sang in the air, it hung, but only silence met it, even breaths swallowed down, every doctor and soldier with eyes fixed on the ground, unmoving, scared schoolchildren once more.

“Will none answer?” asked the Lady, disappointment clear in her voice, but in that disappointment hid an edge of steel, like a bell from some church steeple at break of day, like a blade.

Like a blade, waiting to rest at the neck of whoever dared raise their head and answer.

Waiting to fall.

“For the triumph of our Empire,” said England, and he saw the stains of mud on his boot from the last battle, heard his words at once too small and too loud. “For allegiance to our King.”

He kept his eyes cast downward, but he could hear hooves clip-clopping, again, until he not only _heard_ but saw them, dark shapes at the edge of his vision, the heavy breaths of the horse.

“For duty then, I see,” came the Noble’s voice, at once quieter and nearer than before. “Tell me then, soldier, have you bled for your duty? For the triumph of the Crown? At the King’s command?”

_A drop, but he saw a gush, a fountain of coins and flowers—_

England swallowed.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Have you killed?”

The shot echoed ‘round the world.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Would you die?”

His blood rushed in his ears. The mudstains on his boot traced shapes like continents on a map.

He was not there, but some other where.

“Yes, my lady.”

A long moment, silence stretching elastic.

“Then all is as it should be,” declared the Lady, raising her voice for the crowd, and England could hear that she was smiling. “For it’s a poor soldier who can’t sacrifice some part of himself for a greater cause.”

The reply came loud this time, in chorus, from the throats of every soldier in red, every doctor in black, from him.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Do you serve the Crown?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Emblems stitched in red and black.

“Some among your number have been less loyal,” she said, lightly. “And fled, the cowards, for such little things. Weak stomachs and cold feet, common blood and bleeding hearts.”

A silence of cat-caught tongues.

“You have no stomachs.” The Noble’s voice was iron, the bell ringing out. “No feet. No blood. No hearts.”

The blade carving into them, cutting away.

“You were born from the mud of your motherland.”

_Mud on his boots. Continents._

“What you lose in war, becomes the fertilizer of its soil.”

_London, waking._

“And waters the trees, and they grow green.”

_—as a sceptre for England, the queen of the—_

“So is any loss in vain?”

“No, my lady.”

Again, a chorus of replies.

England saw hooves move from his field of vision, heard them clopping away, heard that voice, calling out.

“Who holds the right to your lives?”

Voices answered loud, each voice a different answer, each answer nearly the same.

“The nation.”

“The Empire.”

“The Crown.”

“The King.”

_The people,_ thought England, reflexively, but no, it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t quite—

“The Crown does not lose.” Again, that smile in the Noble lady’s voice. “And should one of you men flinch at the cost of victory, he may lose all that and more. So bleed, and kill, and die, my boys. But see to it that it’s so.”

Hooves clopped away as they bowed their heads in silence.

England remained staring down at the grass, as his boot, as the people around him began to venture glances upwards, to look about and rise to their feet, unsteadily back into the light. Their chatter rose up, but his head was stuffed with buzzing. He could not make out a word.

Chatter, noise.

The sun was hot on the back of his neck.

Chatter, mutters.

_Here comes the candle to light you to bed—_

Chatter. _Gasps._

Curses, and prayers.

England lifted his head and saw a forest of fingers pointed, heads turned eastward, and then he was lurching to his feet, peering through the crowd, then pushing through it for a better view, elbows jostling against elbows—

He saw it.

Through a gap among those heads and shoulders, clear as day.

A tree as old and broad as his own homeland oak. Its branches hung with torn, empty coats.

Red, and black.

— _and here comes the chopper to—_

Like flags.

Rust-stained.

_—chop off your—_

Blood, splattered over the leaves of the tree, dripping down its trunk, watering its roots.

A red, red rain.

_Weak stomachs and cold feet—_

A metallic breeze.

_—common blood—_

He was trying to make sense of what had happened. He was trying. He was trying—

— _and bleeding hearts._

He had knelt in the presence of a Noble. He had—

— _been cut to pieces—_

—heard her command.

There was no more sense to be made from it.

(He could allow himself no more.)

England remained standing there for a moment longer, looking on, then spun and marched away, pressing his hands against his sides to still their shaking as he ducked back into his tent.

Inside, he found a musket dissected, pieces scattered across the ground, barrel, lock, stock, ramrod, odds and ends. Cleaning supplies strewn among them, a stained and crumpled linen cloth, a metal musket worm, a bottle of oil, a canteen. Smudges of dark powder marred wood, fabric, metal, skin, the edges of everything softened by dim, muted noon sunlight.

His hands remembered the motions, and the supplies were packed away, the cloth rinsed and wrung out and folded, bottle and canteen securely screwed shut, everything returned to its kit.

He saw his powder-stained hands tremble as he worked. Felt his heart in his throat.

There was a dream he had in which he was surrounded by all he knew, but their aspect was strange, and their expressions twisted with cruelty or mockery or hunger. They gathered around him, loomed over, leered, and he twisted and turned, searching for a way out, a gap, a path through the mist, some escape, caught a familiar silhouette or the flash of teeth, but found nothing more, no salvation, only an ever-tightening ring of enemies.

_Lose all that and—_

The musket snapped together in his hands, pieces falling into place, lock to stock to barrel, glossy in the soft light, cold and smooth against his palms.

— _more._

A weapon.

_Show your heart and that is where they will aim their blade._

In the corners of the tent. In the corners of his mind. Amidst his own ranks. There were hiding.

England rifled through the corners of the tent, and drew out the final piece of his weapon.

The blade slid into place beneath the barrel of the musket, jutting out past where it ended. Giving it _reach,_ in the close range, the ability to draw blood with a sweep or a stab.

A heirloom of a different time, of a different war. Blades had given way to firearms, and firearms shared space with rates and ratios.

The world had changed, and it had stayed the same.

The blade gleamed. It gleamed in his memory, in the Revolution he couldn’t help but relive, slick with rain and blood, shaking as it pointed a path to the heart of America, shaking like a needle between his fingers, stabbing into flesh—

It was a story, but it ended, it always ended in the same place.

_He fell to his knees in the mud._

England weighed the bayonet across his palms.

It felt _right._

It felt necessary.

All his demons, his monsters beneath the sea, they were waiting, in the shadows, in the corners, drawing closer, encircling him. Reaching out with hands and claws. They dragged at him. They dragged him down.

If he let them, they would drag him back, back in time, to the grey seasons, to the Revolution. He couldn’t afford to hesitate, to stop. He had to keep moving. Moving out of their grasp. Moving forward, one step after the other, even if he couldn’t see what lay ahead. Even if he could.

England closed his hands around the bayonet. He placed a finger at the trigger.

No one could afford weakness, empires least of all.

_Mercy, mercy, leave and never—_

_Forgive me,_ he mouthed, the words soundless, voiceless.

He knew what he needed to do.

-x-

_~~To the United States of America,~~_  
_~~If you have any regard for our past ties, for your relationship with your brother, for the well-being of your citizenry, for the colour of your wheatfields from above—then I beg of you to cease your resistance and sign for peace. At this point in the war, withdrawal, even were it in my volition, is beyond my means. Victory, meanwhile, grows further from yours by the day.~~_  
_~~War is always a dangerous task for a nation. To war is to exert force, and in war, it is easy for a nation to misjudge the amount of force they are able to expend. As I’m sure you’ve seen, the costs accrued in the heat of battle can be staggering in hindsight's clarity.~~_  
_~~Conflict unsettles stable identities. When the status quo is called into question, changes which would normally be temporary or minor may become permanent and dire. Scars form. The door to true death is opened, should the integrity of a nation’s status come into dispute. It is as easy to fall as it is to rise. I have seen it before. I never want to see it happen to you.~~_  
_~~Come back to me. The reservations you have, the objections you hold to my presence, they can be discussed. We do not need to be at war.~~_  
_~~If you remember~~_

 

_To the United States of America,_  
_For the third and last time, I extend to you the opportunity to surrender, under my previously specified conditions._  
_If you refuse, then there will be no quarter._  
_Stop this foolishness. You are hurting yourself more than anyone._  
_The Crown Kingdom_

-x-

An envelope lay in the letterbox, and Canada drew it out with his heart in his throat, turned it over and looked for the sender, roll the dice, north, east, south, west, who it could be, who it _wasn’t_ —

He saw blue.

A blue stamp, with a profile of the King crowned.

And circling that profile, the words _STAMP DUTY NEW ZEALAND,_ in block letters.

Dated in the summer of last year.

_Oh._

The paper was warm between his fingers, as if it had only been released moments ago, not all of a year. As if it had only just been sitting in the sun, not lost in some train or boat or box or pile awaiting delivery. Like it hadn’t come all the way across the ocean.

For a moment all he could do was stare.

Like someone had cleaned off his glasses and righted them on his face, _look,_ there was a world beyond the fog of war. Like someone had turned him around and pointed him to a window, _look,_ and he’d seen all the way across the sea, far from his native shore, and he remembered there was more. There was so much more.

_There it is._

All it took was perspective.

Canada wandered from the post office with his eyes still fixed on the stamp, heedless of the shoulders bumping against his, of the closing door knocking against his back. Descending the entrance steps, he seated himself on the bottommost, opened the envelope with careful hands, and unfolded the letter within. New Zealand’s open, curvy handwriting was a far cry from Canada’s own small, neat print, America’s bold scrawl that devoured paper faster than fire, England’s impeccable penmanship that devolved into a doctor’s scribble when hurried.

Canada smoothed out the letter. He began to read.

 

_Dear Canada,_  
_How’s it going in the other hemisphere? I heard your brother was in a bit of a kerfuffle—hope that didn’t end up bothering you too much. Sometimes it gets to be a bit much to have a loud neighbour._  
_Me, I was in a spot of trouble recently, but the Academy stepped in and cleared it right up. To be honest those stitched soldiers really skeeved me out, but I don’t want to dwell when it’s quiet now. It’s a lot better without all the fighting._  
_Anyways, it’s not all war and gloom. I found gold! Australia’s been obsessed with the stuff since Ophir, and now I can see why. It’s a bit of a rush—pun not intended—everyone flocking to your land hoping to get rich. I still think all the cheering and dancing was a bit excessive though. And the moping once the stuff started running dry. And_ especially _the rioting. Really, he should know better._  
_You know, I’ve been meaning to ask—how_ do _you deal with having a loud neighbour?_  
_I bet Aussie and I have an easier time of it than you, both being Crown and having a straitful of water between us, but I figured we could exchange tips anyhow. You know, I have pretty good relations with him, but sometimes it seems like he grew bigger so fast (probably the gold), so I get a bit worried about being overshadowed, and, well, I guess he never listened to me anyhow, but I wouldn’t like it if we couldn’t talk freely like equals anymore, you know?_  
_I mean, we get along pretty well when he’s not acting out so much—you don’t have to worry about us going to war or anything!—but I figure I could get your take and catch up a little. Us Crown colonies have to stick together, huh?_  
_Hoping to hear from you soon (as soon as you can get with all the oceans in the way, anyways),_  
_New Zealand_

 

Canada held the letter for a moment longer, reading and rereading the words.

Felt a faint smile on his face.

Fumbling, he reached into his pocket. Found the stub of a pencil.

Turning the letter over, he braced it against his knee, set lead to paper, and began to draft out a reply.

As he wrote, something loosened inside him, like thread unravelling, like jagged edges smoothing out. He breathed, breathed _easy,_ let the words flow and knew that even without a war, even without independence, they _mattered._ Maybe, in some small way, they could help someone.

Like a little bit of light, in a forest dark and tangled.

Like a glimpse of what he wanted.

Of who he was going to be.

After the war.

_Someday._

He was going to be better.

He would make it better, somehow, with pen and paper, with stitches, with weeding and watering and waiting for something to grow. He would figure it out, his balancing act. Find a path through it all, one not written in blood, a cleaner way, his own way.

Like organizing letters in the dying light, papers like flags against the shadows, stacks aligned and drawers neatly labelled, everything returned to its proper place. Like closing wounds. Like standing in the current.

_Who?_

He could be.

_I’m Canada._

He could see it.

In the sunlight that poured down around him, soaking into the paper he wrote on, the steps he sat on, the pores of his skin, caught in his eyes, like gold, he could believe it.

-x-

_Dear New Zealand,_  
_I’m sorry for such a late reply—I think your letter was lost in the mail, and it only just arrived. I’m glad to hear that things were going well for you, and I hope that hasn’t changed._  
_I think you must’ve heard by now about all the fighting just next door from me. It's not the first time it’s happened, but I think it might be the worst. I’m okay, but I’m not sure what anyone else will be, going forward. A lot has changed. A lot is still changing._  
_When it comes to Australia, I’m not sure how the past year has changed things, or if I can help you very much, but I’ll try. I know the feeling of seeing someone you’re very familiar with suddenly grow so much bigger. It makes you feel small. But I think that Australia won’t really outgrow your company, even if it seems like he has. It’s hard to do that with someone you’re that close to to, geographically or otherwise._  
_If he’s thoughtless sometimes, please try to let it go after a while? Someday it might be harder for you to maintain good relations, and I’d rather your relationship be strong enough to weather it anyways._  
_I’m probably not the best nation to give advice on being overshadowed, really, but I’m thinking what matters is that we start to make our own choices, to be ourselves, clear enough from Britain or our neighbours that you can tell from looking. It's something to be careful about, what you have to work with, how far you can afford to grow from someone, or how close. But the world is different now, and we’re supposed to be the New._  
_Maybe we can be different too._  
_Sincerely,_  
_Canada_

-x-

Canada’s letters arrived like snow, quietly, and like snow they melted away, beneath piles of maps and manifestos. England told himself he would send reply, and he tried, he truly did, but he set pen to paper and found that he had no words left, nothing to _say._

All that was left was action.

Days passed into weeks, like the pages of a book, flipping. He thought of snow heavy on the ground last winter, he thought of libraries, how vast they could be, how empty. He thought of silence, because silence was what met him.

It mattered very little that letters continued to come, from Canada, from his government. It mattered very little that he was surrounded by doctors and officers and soldiers every hour of the day. It mattered very little that day and night he could hear bells and birdsong, near or in London.

America was losing. America continued to fight.

England read the newspapers when there was room for breathing, for reading. In the papers of the unconquered cities he found diatribes against the latest crimes of his campaign, exposition on the unnatural nature of the stitched soldiers, adulation for the courage of soldiers. Headlines glared at him in blackletter typeface. Sometimes he found the newspapers of Crown presses, and columns of miniscule text informed him that he was winning. Victory was at hand.

If he kept moving forward.

If he did not falter.

It came to pass that the hours of his sleep shrank to a sliver. More and more often he lay awake, with the nights growing shorter and shorter, and imagined he was speaking to America.

_I never taught you such suicidal stubbornness,_ he thought, although soon enough he would remember all the wars he’d fought, they way they’d called him across the sea and left him battered on return, and wonder if that was why.

_Look what you’ve done with your freedom,_ he thought, _look what your freedom did to you. Didn’t it tear you apart? Look at France._ But England had fought more civil wars than he could count on one hand, and he remembered—

_—then will I wait, till the waters abate_

_Which now disturb my troubled brain—_

—that his monarchs had been the shifting of the tides—

_I had reason,_ he thought.

_I have reason._

_You have always belonged with me._

Like bells without clappers, ringing soundless and hollow. He could hear America snapping back at him, _Nothing is ever enough for you._

It was there in the dark that he sometimes came to doubt himself. Memories of better times glimmered like sunshine on a lake, and he wanted to believe that he could sail upon them. He wanted to believe that none of this was necessary. That nothing had broken which could not be fixed. That he would not to face America, someday quite soon, would not have to—

_You were always so naive,_ he thought, and he was standing on a battlefield in the pouring rain, but it was not America he faced.

Only a mirror, his own face looking back at him.

_You fool._

In his mind he spat the word.

_That is how a war is lost._

He levied the bayonet at his own heart.

The silence stretched, elastic and unbroken. It lingered until sunrise, until he emerged from his tent scoffing at his fancies and dreams. It lingered through days flipping past like pages, running out like sand in an hourglass. It persisted as spring ceded to summer, as resistance concentrated and maps sprouted pins like garden flowers, as Academies began to grow in Crown America.

_Then let's hope for a peace, for the wars will not cease_

_'Til the king enjoys his own again…_

His feet paced lines and his mind paced circles. There was nothing left for anyone to say.

-x-

_For review by Consultant Arthur Kirkland, by order of his Majesty_  
_Attached is an annotated map delineating proposed borders and subdivisions for the Crown States of America._  
_It is and has always been vital to maintain unity in British North America. It is our considered opinion that this proposal simplifies the relevant administrative processes while appropriately asserting the authority of the Crown._  
_In the consciousness of the populace, there is symbolism in name and border. Remove both, and the inevitable conflicts of identity are stifled._  
_Awaiting your opinion,_  
_War and Colonial Office of the Crown Kingdom_

-x-

A boy woke from a dream.

He gasped, like a swimmer, head breaking the surface of the water, reaching for the sky, searching for the stars. Pushed himself upright, into a sitting position, and looked around the room for monsters in the corners, monsters in the shadows, but felt only the whisper of his fast, shallow breaths, the pulse of his heart in his ears, skin drawn over muscles over bones. A creature of moving parts.

It was just him.

Fumbling through the darkness, he reached for the candle on the nightstand, a matchbox. Tried, once, twice, thrice to light a match, before it finally caught, and then the candle flared like a miniature sun, almost blinding to his night-accustomed eyes.

He held the candle in his hands. Felt the heat of the flame on his face.

A white paw landed on his knee.

“Who?” asked a voice.

He tried to answer.

“I’m—”

Three syllables.

“I am—”

Three syllables, six letters, easy as that, but they came apart, like a musket, into pieces, into regions, into settlements, into tribes, into languages, into cultures, into names, into history, like plucking a lark ‘til nothing, nothing was left—

What was he doing?

“ _Je m’appelle—_ ”

He was made of pieces. He was made of layers. He was alone, and he felt his dream in his bones, in his blood, in the shifting of his skin.

_(This is who I am and will be.)_

The bear’s eyes glinted in the dark.

“I’m,” and this time he did manage to say the name, but somehow his words came out like a question, like uncertainty.

He stared up at the ceiling and did not sleep again that night.

-x-

(Blockades and interception, birds falling from the sky, a world linked by threads until someone’s hand reached out with shears, _snip, snip,_ and the strings snapped, words unheard, pieces falling away into the sea, into the void of silence.)

-x-

America fell, piece by painful piece and his lands become England’s, became the Empire’s. That was all that mattered these days, the _Empire,_ united under the King, under the Crown.

The Crown Empire.

The name fit like a coat cut a size too big, but he would grow into it. He already had. With maps spread out around him, he could trace the paths he would take and had already taken. He could watch his reach expand.

Maps are spread out around them, the crisp and new and the yellow with age, annotated in ink. Names of cities retaken. Names of ones yet to be gained.

An fat white envelope, atop a map of North America, the letters of the address sharp and angry.

It had been sitting there since morning, and with night falling and lamps burning, England could ignore it no longer.

He picked up the envelope, weighed it in his hand. It was lumpy, and heavier than a letter ought to be. He felt a substance inside, a sort of powder.

He wondered if it was poison, though America was hardly the type.

England opened the envelope, carefully, though still the paper tore, and he dipped his fingers inside.

They came out smudged with ash.

_Oh, America,_ because it was not a surrender, and if it was not a surrender then he knew—he knew—

He knew what he had to do.

Maps spread out around him. Too much to gain.

Cities like hopscotch. He could imagine it. The cliff’s edge. The aftermath. All the ways to fall and break.

He was the Crown Empire.

The Crown did not lose.

He was not afraid, but his hand shook. It shook badly enough that he dropped the envelope ( _as if it was still burning_ ) and the ash spilt, all over the maps, over the cities taken and and not yet so, paths trodden and yet unreached.

Everything was ashes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. Longest chapter yet by far. I've reread the words so often they've worn grooves into my brain and that makes further editing a lot harder, so it's with regret and relief that I wash my hands of this section. Onwards and upwards.  
> Next chapter is mostly pre-written and very short, so it shouldn't take long to go up, and after that, a return to the present, and our good friend the Crown States. 
> 
> Turns out I made another Twig timeline oopsie—parasites are from a later war. Not gonna retcon this, but I might address it at some point.
> 
> The rose is the floral emblem of England. 
> 
> In the Noble scene, England thinks of a fragment of a song, the full lyric of which is this:  
>  _When Alfred, our King, drove the Dane from this land,_  
>  _He planted an oak with his own royal hand;_  
>  _And he pray'd for Heaven's blessing to hallow the tree,_  
>  _As a sceptre for England, the queen of the sea._  
>  Lyric snippets from his next scene ("Which now disturb my troubled brain", "Then let's hope for peace") are from a English Civil War royalist song, "When the King Enjoys His Own Again", which shares its tune with "The World Turned Upside Down", a song unreliably stated to have been played at the British surrender at Yorktown.
> 
> The [musket worm](http://www.hiltpewter.com/itemphotos/1253_photo_1.jpg) was an actual tool used for cleaning muskets. The more you know.
> 
> The War and Colonial Office was a historical British government department from 1801 until 1854, at which point the "War" and "Colonial" parts were split into different departments. To be honest it's pretty likely Twigbritain had a Major Governmental Restructuring, but I like to think they kept that office combined just 'cause.
> 
> Chapter title: "(A bird in the hand is worth) **two in the bush**."


	7. A Single Step

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"He was the Crown Empire, ruler of the world entire, and he had taken another step forward, towards victory.”_  
>   
>  The world turned downside-up, cont'd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during None So Blind (Chapter 2). Historical accuracy caveats apply, etc.

**Mid-to-Late 19th Century**  
Western Maine, the United States of America  
_The Second War of American Independence_

-x-

England’s thoughts buzzed slow and muddled in the summer heat, like the wingbeats of a dying fly throwing itself futilely against a windowpane. Nausea rose in his throat like the sea beneath a pitching ship, he was leaning over the edge, he couldn’t quite catch his balance. Before and around and below him, doubled armies trembled in the heat haze, haze trembling from pain-torn voices. The gaze of the sun seared the back of his neck.

Nothing felt quite real.

A face leaped out at him from the blue-coated ranks of the enemy. Recognition hit like a blow, like a pit yawning wide open inside him. He was staring into it. There was nothing but a long, long fall.

_Remember what you have to do._

The bugle call rang out like morningsong, like answer: _Charge._

They charged. Stitched leading the advance, a shield of flesh, soaking the first blows. Living soldiers rushing behind. He was alive. His boots pounded against the grass. Time twisted odd, stretching and knotting, at once too slow and too fast. He moved as if through a dream. Suddenly the two sides were clashing, muskets and rifles and cannons firing in _cracks_ and _booms,_ blood splattering, bodies collapsing underfoot. Fire bloomed; sparks sprayed; bayonets flashing blinding in the sun. Suddenly his own bayonet was buried in someone’s chest, and he was close enough to see the widening of their eyes; suddenly the blade was bloody, and they were gone, and he was pressing forward through the gap left behind, like a shot fired from a rifle, ceaseless, inevitable.

Until suddenly—

A pair of blue eyes.

—he found him.

_There you are._

America’s face was thin and sharp-edged in a way that made England want to say, _you should eat more._ Dark circles shadowed his eyes. _Get more sleep._ There was blood on his coat, scarlet impossible to miss— _that’s where you should wear red—_ and more dripping sluggishly off the tip of his bayonet. He was breathing hard. Both of them were.

The moment spooled out long, and for a moment that was all there was, the two of them on the field of battle, facing each other across a distance smaller than it had been in years.

Then America moved his head, some infinitesimal centimetre, and the sun gleamed off his glasses and that was all England could see, blue eyes disappearing behind harsh white glare, like they had the winter before, like they had every time America had smiled and lied and tilted his head _just so,_ glasses the child America had never worn, and he remembered, that he was fighting a war—

His bayonet flashed through the distance between them. America raised his musket to deflect. It was a futile gesture. Guns were not shields.

But the old memory of a younger face surfaced from beneath the water, and—

— _have mercy—_

—the blade slipped sideways, catching on flesh, slashing a red line across the back of America’s hand.

That was what it looked like at first. A thin red line. Then the blood poured down over America’s knuckles and the _brightness_ of it hit like a voltaic shock and the younger nation stumbled back with a hiss, fingers red-stained, and suddenly everything was terribly, terrifyingly real.

_You fool._

England’s hands were shaking badly. He had thought he’d had the resolve to complete the strike. He had thought he’d had the heart and stomach. He had thought that even as tides turned and seasons waxed and waned and allies turned their coats inside out, he could control _this_ , this one thing: the movement of his own body. The weapon in his own hands.

_You did so always have the habit of winning the battle and losing the war._

If he could not trust himself to do what was necessary, then he had nothing at all in the world. That was _all,_ the thin line between defeat and victory, strength and weakness, life and death: the ability to take a single step, land a single blow, make a single shot.

“Surrender,” he said, words ringing metallic and hollow.

“In your dreams,” spat America, all fire and steel, with his musket aimed at England’s heart, a finger poised at the trigger.

Death loomed like the star-studded night at close of day.

Later England would tell himself, watching water run pink, that his hand had slipped, he had not meant it. Later he would tell himself, in the late hours of the night, that he had planned it from the start, heartless, he had meant it all along. Later he would tell himself that he had tried, tried, tried, but the crossroads had narrowed until there was only one road that ended with him standing. Later he would tell himself a thousand lies, because the truth was that the truth was a second split, a thin golden needle in a mound of a hay, and it was lost to him.

The shot echoed. Wide as the equator.

Deafening.

For a moment all he saw were America’s widening eyes, before the other nation gasped and doubled over, weapon dropping to the grass, hands going to the wound at his chest.

_He didn’t think you would do it._

America fell, and the ground crumbled beneath England’s feet and he was falling, too, down and down, plunging off the edge of a precipice with nothing to catch him but the ground.

_You proved him wrong._

Terror swelled, vast and formless, like cold water flooding the holds of a ship, black waves breaking over the deck. It washed over him and he was drowning in it, struggling for breath, against the roiling of his stomach, the trembling of his blood-slick, sweat-slick hands, but he had left it all behind himself, the cliff’s edge, the white coast. He was very far from land.

Monsters. Teeth in the water.

_If they taste your blood then they will tear you to pieces._

His breath rattled in and out of his lungs. God, he was afraid, but he couldn’t let his hands shake. He couldn’t let it show. Couldn’t _crack,_ not a hairline sliver, or else everything would go to pieces. His heart pounded against his ribcage. His grip on his weapon was white-knuckled. He swallowed, tried to muster his voice, hold it steady, steady, but cannonfire and screams and a single echoing gunshot and America’s blood was so very red as it spilt past his fingers and he’d _shot_ America, his gun his fingers his decision and he shouldn’t have—shouldn’t—

—couldn’t ever take the moment back—

“Surrender,” he said, for the second time that battle, and his voice was worlds away but somehow the word came out the way he’d intended it. Flat. Merciless. Devoid of fear. Of pain. Of regret.

_Monstrous._

America mouthed a reply, but no words came, only blood and a groan. England’s fear spiked dizzyingly fast and he almost moved from the force of it, almost took a step forward, stretched out a hand, anything. He wanted to rush to America and catch his shoulders. He wanted to help him staunch the bleeding as if he hadn’t caused it. He wanted to drop his weapon to the grass and make promises he couldn’t keep and do one thing that felt clear and _right,_ in this mess of a war, this morass of fear and doubt, but all he could do, all he _did,_ was stand frozen, watching America bleed, as the world tilted into a new configuration around him.

Right and wrong were far behind him on the path to victory, and the only way left for him to go was down.

When he blinked the aftermath of the red lingered, like a terrible dream.

“America,” he said, and this time there was an affect to the word, something he hadn’t intended and couldn’t identify, a sort of urgent, muted desperation.

_Please._

America looked up at him then, with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, face tight with pain. Wordless. Accusatory. Kneeling in the torn-up ground, coat red-stained, with England standing above, musket in hand, still aimed.

A memory. A mirror image.

_You—_

Something shifted in America’s expression, then, like the tilt of a head, like the gleam of glass. For a moment he became a stranger. There was no trace of the child England had known, the one who had looked at him with trust in his eyes, clung when he left and lit up when he returned, the one who had chosen him over France. England had grown so accustomed to seeing that child stir behind America’s eyes that he had come to believe that he was immortal. That they could war, that they could hurt each other, but that memory, the ghost of it, would remain.

— _used to be—_

Like homes burning. Like watching someone die.

Almost like hate.

America’s gaze cut into England like glass, and he felt the weight of what he’d done like a vivisection, sins laid out like organs, bright and bloody. He felt the weight of those eyes, others, a _world’s_ baleful judgment like nails scraping across his skin, digging, scrabbling, all searching for a crack, a foothold, some leverage to topple him, to bring him low. He felt the weight of that future, _his_ future, settle like an anchor, a crown, a sky wide and blue, and he was falling, he found that he was still falling, down and down without end, because that was what it _meant_ , to be a nation, to be an empire: a long fall towards an uncertain reckoning, a sea of unseen monsters, waiting for a promise to be fulfilled.

_That everything dies, and turns to ashes._

But if he never hit the ground, then he might as well be flying.

America’s gaze sank between the ribs like a knife, and he almost broke from the twist of the blade, but he was trying to grasp the world in his hand, and he could not bleed. He could not be afraid. Not of what he’d done and what he’d have to do. Not of what he was becoming.

Not of anything.

He was the Crown Empire, ruler of the world entire, and he had taken another step forward, towards victory.

The Empire took a tattered, unsteady breath. He met America’s eyes. It was only the two of them, in that moment. A graveyard of golden memories between them.

_Let him hate me,_ he thought, with a resolve slim but waxing. _Let him rage against me. Let him curse my name._

Each word felt like dirt heaped on his own grave, but he kept raising the shovel.

_Let him hate me, but let me win._

More soil to smother the him that bled.

_Let him be mine._

Until that old face disappeared beneath the water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So remember when I said this wouldn't take very long? Yeah, I was wrong. My apologies.
> 
> This chapter is one of the first I ever wrote for this story, back in spring 2018 (All's Fair was the literal first). It's changed a lot since then, and things turned out a little jerky when I started grafting new writing onto the old. Nonetheless, I'm glad it finally gets to see the light of day.
> 
> This recent chunk of past chapters was originally only England's perspective - obviously that changed during the writing process, but at least he gets to end things off for now. Next chapter will be a present one, and there'll be a few more chronologically recent chapters before we return to this time period and to the aftermath of the war.
> 
> By chapter count, I'm a little less than 1/4 of the way through this story. That's not necessarily indicative of content, though - there's a lot of variance in how long chapters are.
> 
> Chapter title: "(A journey of a thousand miles begins with) **a single step**."


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